There are many ways and tools to choose your next device, but some are better than others. How do you do it?
I'll begin - I tend to use Kimovil, however it lacks pricing for many devices and thus makes the process harder. Has many filters though, from headphone jack to different 5G and 4G bands.
GSMARENA Phone Finder is pretty amazing. You can filter by basically any phone characteristic you want. Back material? Yep. Refresh rate? Also yes. Proximity sensor? You got it. Minimum wired charging wattage? Sure, why not.
I've yet to find a more comprehensive one.
Edit: taking a look at Kimovil. It seems like it has much of the same filters as Phone Finder, but with the bonus of also showing price, which is nice.
My only gripe is I can't filter by SoC type, like Snapdragon only for example, otherwise it's a cool thing to have, but yeah, kimovil shows regional pricing
Devices for LineageOS and I then use the official website to validate it, as well as GSMArena Phone Finder
This would be the perfect website for what I need if it only had a headphone jack filter!!!
I mean, you can use the Devices for LineageOS as a way to create a filtered list, and then filter the "candidates" by going to GSMArena.
I stay whit Sony phones. Besides me loving the 21:9 ratio, they have headphone jacks
Well, my first criteria is an unlockable bootloader, followed by rootability.
Those alone usually pare the options down to 2 to 4 phones, so I really don't have to think too much about the cool features.
I expect to use my phone from 2 to 5 years, so compatibility with certain ROM producers is Aldo high on the list.
I look up what I like in a phone (headphone jack, expandable storage, led, Snapdragon..., plastic back, etc.) and use gsmsarena's advanced search feature.
GSMArena has nice phone search functionality, I was using it often when thinking about upgrading, but to be frank I bought 2 of my last phones basically on release date based off specs, unboxings and first impressions I saw online, even not full reviews were online, those phones were:
- Motorola One Vision - May 2019 - 128GB of UFS storage, modern punch hole display and OIS equipped camera sounded cool, unfortunately the camera was kind of sub par, slight zoom resulted in garbage photo, also apparently Motorola couldn't optimize for exynos because despite somewhat satisfying performance, stuttering was frequent
- OnePlus Nord 3 - July 2023 - powerful SoC, 16GB of RAM, OnePlus declares 3 years of software support, fast 80W charging, looks nice on paper, my only gripe is battery drain but they keep optimizing the software
I mostly use GSMarena to compare features and check out reviews of shortlisted phones on amazon and youtube. Kimovil looks interesting. Will try it out next time.
I stick to Pixels because I use GrapheneOS, that makes it simple lol
www.epey.com - Turkish website that can serve that purpose for a very wide variety of things. It allows filtering based on specs, comparing items side by side and shows price history. The prices and availability isn't always complete so I usually pick what I want from there and search the web to see if they're any lower prices. And it only lists items that are on sale in Turkey so might not be as useful to people living in other countries, but might be worth trying.
I search for "update duration Android OEMs" and to no one's surprise find there are only 3 flagships with ok support: Google, Samsung, OnePlus
I was given two options, so I pitted the two phones against each other. Pros and cons, you know? And then the winner was the phone I got.
A smartphone is the ultimate, single-user personal computer. Choosing a device is too intimate for me to use any sort of tabular comparison tool. The device needs to be right for me qualitatively also.
I strongly recommend picking a handful of devices and getting a variety of opinions from reviewers. Then, weigh those opinions against what features are most important to you.
If this is your main computer which most likely it is for most people, it's worthwhile to spend some time on selection.
I check for LineageOS support, repairability (kind of pointless nowdays), a headphone jack and a SD card slot and end up buying something that just supports LineageOS because apparently I am asking too much of a modern phone... :(
