For me it’s Motorola because they are one of the few companies still iterating and throwing different weird designs at the wall to see what sticks.
Hopefully they’ll throw one at the wall with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard lol. Whoever does that again (that’s not a niche device full of other issues) will get my money immediately.
Same. The Motorola Droid 4 is my all time favorite phone, not viable as a modern daily driver, but damn do I miss being able to pop the keyboard out for longer messages, compose mostly coherent messages without looking, or just reclaim screen real estate.
Whichever ones allow bootloader unlocking, make it not a PITA to unlock, and are generally developer friendly (or at least not antagonistic to developers).
For a while that was Motorola, but I’ve read recently less models are allowed to be unlocked. OnePlus is also pretty good about unlocking the bootloader.
Okay so not specifically to do with smartphones but Nokia was the most innovative and creative designer of cell phones altogether, until they made the unfortunate mistake of going all-in with Windows Phone with the Lumia. They should have been smart enough to see that like almost everything MS does, it was doomed from the start. It was their downfall :-( So sad because they made some of the most gorgeous phones in the world.
I have a modest collection of Nokia phones and I’d like one day to have one of everything they made.
Smartphones nowadays are just catalysts to exploitation. There’s no more innovation they’re just cramming more things they can claim as “features” without really making any substantial innovation anymore. There are a handful of gems here and there but they’re really spread evenly across the gamut of brands. Also there are so many more smartphones with cool designs and functionality that are just not available in the U.S.A. I don’t really understand why, other than the big names wanting to keep the market stuck to the same handful of gigantic bricks that refuse the idea of any flavor or character. Maybe they lobby to keep affordable and innovative designs out of the U.S. market so they can keep peddling their mediocrity forever.
Now that I think about it, every phone I’ve owned has had significant issues: lousy camera (HTC), overheating (LG), poor battery life (Samsung, Google, HTC), steadily degrading performance (Samsung), boot looping (LG), weird colour handling on photos (HTC, Google), etc. So I guess they’re all bad?
I wouldn’t say “favourite”. I’ve bought two Pixels because I like the photos they produce.
My current phone (P8P) has the fewest issues so far. It’s only a year old, so I’m sure they’ll appear.
Essential RIP. The PH-1 was the best phone I’ve ever owned
