Team-BHP (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/)

-   Gadgets, Computers & Software (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/)

-   -   The Mobile Phone Thread - Queries, decisions, discussions all here (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/63048-mobile-phone-thread-queries-decisions-discussions-all-here-785.html)

Cannot agree more. Bought one for myself 5 months ago trusting all the positive reviews around, but it is not as good as I expected it to be. Especially battery life and camera, I expected the phone to perform a lot better in these departments than it actually does.

Check out the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra. Comes with top of the line flagship processor and as per several reviews has exceptional battery life too.

If you are on a budget, check out the Realme 9 Speed Edition, currently available for 15k. Comes with SD 778 processor and a 144 Hz refresh rate display. That sounds like a combo that's made specifically for gaming. Not sure how the battery would hold up though.

This felt very good.

Himayat Nagar, Hyderabad

Appreciate your advice.

Ordered the Motorola Edge 30 Pro for INR 39700. This includes 1 year addional warranty that I opted for before checkout.
The Ultra was beyond my budget.
No fan of IQOO's 'Funtouch' OS. It is for kids.

I considered several RealMe options as well as the Nothing Phone (1)

Not going to touch RealMe, Xiaomi, Redmi, Poco etc with a barge pole. Day to day seamless experience with stock OS is paramount.

Fun fact - Real GT 2 Pro, their 'flagship' has 120Hz display.But several apps and games lock out at 60Hz due to poor software optimization. Several models lack basic IP rating.

It is unfortunate to see many naive consuners fall for RealMe's marketing gimmicks.

All these Chinese brands (under Xiaomi umbrella) are enticing people with multiple Android version updates and top specs.

As for the 10000 watt PD charging bricks, another carrot, all those fast charge cycles will reduce the longevity of the battery.

The real joke, is that most have poor software implementation at the core level. Not noticable enough for the average consuner, unfortunately.


Pixel 6A is too small and Pixel 6 and 7 are beyond my budget. Not willing to dump money on a phone with emphasis on camera ( I am an outlier, I know!).

It is a shame that top tier gaming phones like Nubia Red Magic and Black Shark are still not available in India.
When it comes to really cool, niche electronics/accessories/gadgets, our country is still in the dark ages.

I conducted an extensive research on Samsung S20FE & S21FE. This will be controversial, but Samsung are scamming ignorant consumers at that price point. Both have worse battery life than cheaper M series models (that have 6000mAh battery!). S20FE/S21FE are just overrated imaging devices.

I will submit a detailed review of the Edge 30 Pro in our community after a few weeks.

Thanks.

I was one of the people who fell for it, bought the S20 FE 5 months ago. Yes the battery life is not very good.

I bought a couple of M series last year for family members, while they have huge batteries, they are too heavy! I have an S10 and it's so sleek compared to the M, that M seems like from the 90s.

I think battery life should be seen in context of efficiency, carrying a powerbank inbuilt with the phone isn't always ideal!

Agreed. The S series would be a complete package if they had slightly bigger battery packs. Too many charging cycles doesn't help battery life anyway.

Also agree that M series are heavy. I personally prefer that trade-off. My previous phone was a M series with 6000 mAh pack. Which is why it can double up as a powerback to facilitate reverse charging other devices.
Never had to carry addional cables or chargers for my smartwatch of TWS earbuds.

I even had a heavy duty armor case from day 1.
Which is why that phone fetched a very decent resale price. Not at Flipkart though.

The Edge 30 Pro I recently ordered, not only supports reverse charging, but reverse wireless charging too!
Not that its a deal breaker, but good to have for contingencies. The phone is super sleek with a gorgeous 10-bit pOLED display, combined with near stock OS.

A mobile phone doesn't deserve to be called a 'mobile' if mobility factors is missing from it. My brother's profession relies mostly on his mobile but he and his mediocre mobile phone are mostly found in search of charging ports through out the day, I always see his mobile charger in his hand. I hate to be in such situation.

I don't consider a mobile phone as a good one if it is not able to deliver atleast 2 days of gap in between 20-80% charge cycles during average use case. I am not happy with my current Pixel 6 (mostly Samsung hardware including SOC) in this regards which barely manages to surpass 1.5 day mark occasionally, mostly I have to charge it every day.

Seems like I am spoiled by my previous experience with Motorolas, especially the last one which used to deliver 2-3 days of battery backup. Few recent Motorola midrangers bought in the family are even better with the newer hardware.

Chipset efficiency and battery tech has grown upto a point that even my Ryzen 5600 based ultrabook can easily last for 8-12 hours during usage, better than most mobile phones out there which are supposed to fare better in this regard.

So this can not be an excuse for mobile companies if they are still claiming just one day of battery backup as a scoring marketing point with all the technology available at spare. Culprits are not only the hardware combinations, but software as well. Android is turning out into a most inefficient OS of its time.

Even a stock Android phone like Pixel occupies around 5 GB of RAM on the first boot, illogical and indigestible if you ask me. I will call it a decade of inefficient evolution. Even a full fledged Linux distro needs 1.5-2 GB of RAM which runs on much more powerful machines and offers far more productivity.

I know there are logics thrown in favor of Android stating so much services running in the background, but its still illogical, you need to be effcient, if you are not then its a fault, accept it and rectify it. I ditched Windows OS long time back on my work computer due to it's nature of being a hurdle in productivity. I run Linux distro on my workhorse desktop with 64GB where the OS occupies barely 2GB of RAM. But When I work on large projects, all the RAM and other resources are available for me to use in my project instead of large amount occupied by the bloated OS.

Another example of efficiency is I keep few open source services like KDE-Connect and Syncthing running in the background all the time in my Android phone. They occupy negligible amount of RAM or other resources despite running all the time. But other inefficient background services by the Google and the OS itself occupy far more resources than they deserve. Things are worst in the bloated devices sold by Samsung and most Chinese manufacturers.

Bigger irony is the battery policy of all the Android phone manufactures where they ensure making it impossible to find a replacement battery matching the performance of factory fitted one after few years when users actually need them. So a perfectly working phones has to be thrown away just because of the battery.

I am sure automobile companies will also do the same with the EVs stating reasons that the car or the battery model has changed for 'better' so replace the car since replacement battery is not available.

All this garbage is being throw in the name of saving environment and people are buying it.

Take a bow, Sir!

You have encapsulated the current 'devolution' of value for money propositions in mobile phone domain, in the best way possible.

Agree with you on the Moto's. The midrange from them - G52, G62, G72, G82 models are bang for buck and offer very good battery life and also are pretty light. I got the G52, which is a 4g only model, for my mother a couple of months ago and was surprised by how much moto has packed into this midranger.

My friend is going for iPhone 14 Pro. Thanks all for sharing the info on S22.

Since my phone is due for an upgrade, I looked at the current flagships with top cameras, and these are my thoughts.

iPhone 14 Pro Max
+ve: Powerful processor, battery life
-ve: Not as feature-rich as Androids.
Recommendation: Wait for iPhone 15, which might get USB-C charging. The 14 Pro Max is perfect if this isn't a criterion.

Pixel 7 Pro
+ve: Unlimited online photo/video storage by Google, nifty Android 13 hacks by Google
-ve: Battery life is suspect
Recommendation: Overall it's a good phone but doesn't excel in any department (in spite of DXOMARK).

S22 Ultra
+ve: Excellent camera, productivity apps by Samsung
-ve: Not much improvement in performance or battery compared to its predecessor S21.
Recommendation: S22 Ultra is powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which is manufactured by Samsung. The same design manufactured by TSMC improved performance by 10% and battery by 30%. Qualcomm has released this improved design as Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. If S22 Ultra came with SD 8+ G1, then its performance and battery would be close to iPhone 14. So, wait for S23, which will be based on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (launch in 3 to 4 months).

This is a very good point to be noted by those looking at the current S22 line-up. It's one of the major reasons for me to skip the S22 series altogether and settle for S20FE for a year or two till the S23 comes out with TSMC manufactured processor. Samsung has screwed up royally with the 8 Gen 1 processor which is sub-standard compared to TSMC manufactured chips. This is the major reason why Qualcomm ditched Samsung and went back to TSMC after the current 8Gen1's sub-par performance in-spite of Samsung offering better deal for manufacturing its future processors. TSMC is the undisputed king for chip manufacturing which is why Apple trusts TSMC to manufacture it's Bionic chips, the design of which are a heavily guarded secret till date.

The last pixel that had unlimited photo video storage in 'storage super save quality' was Pixel 5. Post that, no other pixel, be it 6, 6a, 6 pro, 7 or even 7 pro has any sort of unlimited storage. You have to pay google once you exhaust the free 15GB space.

Thanks! Hadn't noticed the change in Google policy. This takes out a major reason to go for Pixel phones.

Truer words cannot be spoken. Electronics is the biggest example of fleecing the environment in the name of innovation.

Why do we need to change mobiles every 2 years? We should be able to keep one for 5 years at least. Imagine the amount of blue diamond saved?

It is actually a catch-22. Consumers are also to blame because they expect more from a phone nowadays. A desktop, laptop, tab, mobile, each has different use cases. But consumers seem to think of a phone as one size fits all.

Why do we always need to be connected? Why cannot we read emails only once or twice a day unless specifically waiting for one? I am not talking of hiding notifications to solve it - I am talking of not needing to create them in the first place.

My primary phone is a Moto X Play, now in its 8th year. Running as good as new, because I use it as a "phone" only. Yes some apps do not run because they need newer than Android 7, but all basic functionalities of a mobile phone still serve very well. It is funny when iFans say Apple is a long term investment, given my experience with the Moto.

There is no point in having octa core cpus and 8 GB memory if end of the day you get similar latency/ response time while using the app. We saw it with Microsoft as well. To run the same software, Win 7 < Win 10 in memory and cpu consumption. Then we are back to square one.

It is a vicious cycle of new hardware running same software but getting old in a few years because the software is now requiring more resources or we are running unnecessary bloat, so that the consumer "upgrades" after a few years because the device is now "slow".

In iOS and Android, especially Android, the devices are locked from modification because they want to control what is run on the hardware. For example, we still cannot dual boot a phone with Android and Ubuntu. And rooting the device has its own software development ecosystem. Why? because Google runs a lot of bloat in the background in the name of user experience, masked by "Google Play Services".

I have a tab - Lenovo Yoga 2 (2014). Sometime after the last OS update, I managed to kill Play Services for good. Now I cannot run any Google app, but I use the tab only for ebooks and it serves my purpose just fine, giving me much more battery life than earlier.

Gaming is another example (though I take this from the PC world, it is as much applicable to mobile ecosystem) - we still are not in the golden age where any game would run at 1080p 60 fps with acceptable fidelity. End of the day I am looking at pixels on screen, then why a gpu that would run rasterized images at 60 fps 5-7 years back fail to do so with latest games (same rasterization)? Because if that is the case how will NVIDIA sell the next generation of gpus? AMD at least tries to improve the efficiency - consuming less watts for same performance. But AMD ain't no saint either.

Nowadays we have a phone, tab, laptop (I don't though, apart from the work one), desktop, and still we seem to be not contented, compared to 20 years back when a desktop was all we needed.