My intention is to buy the cheapest smartphone I can reasonably get as I need to use a phone for professional reasons; the company uses Whatsapp and other applications I do not want to have occupying space in a smartphone I use for my personal life.
I’ve been loading my phones with FOSS applications from F-Droid for years now but I am aware the loop is tightening and continuing to do so is becoming more and more difficult.
Ideally, I would like to keep this phone as much as possible exempt from connecting with Google. This means I don’t intend to load an account on the phone and instead load F-Droid and Aurora to get the software I want to use.
I suppose you could try to buy some of those phones second hand, or refurbished?! Or maybe ask one of the friends who get a new phone every 2 years if they sell their old phone to you… I mean it’s not easy to get a halfway decent phone for less than 100€. Something like a Samsung A52 should do, though? They’re 75-100€ and LineageOS claims to support the device.
Other option is to not get a second phone and use Android’s work profile to confine the work-related apps to a seperate “container”.
My next words are going to sound as obnoxious but what does define a phone as decent?
Used market in my country is simply ridiculous; people are asking for used phones as if they were new. The people I know all use their phone until end of life.
I need something that can take a visible picture from less than a metre away, has a flashlight function, can handle WhatsApp and a screen large enough I can use to read documents on it and look at aerial photos. Nothing special. And I need it cheap. It is going to be outside, going in and out of pockets, handled with dirty hands, etc.
I have a Fairphone in my eye for personal use, hopefully sooner than later, but that is a purchase I want to make to last me for as much as possible. This is not the case.
Sure. You define what is decent enough for you. I mostly wrote that because there’s very old phones in those lists and some don’t support recent Android versions, which might be a problem if an app requires a somewhat recent Android version. Also something like a very old Motorola will be shuggish, not support 5G, have a potato camera by today’s standards… It’s a bit tricky to hit the sweet spot and then also get something with good support by some custom rom.
And new phones below 100€ tend to be very basic, have the cheapest display available etc…
I’m used to bottom shelf phones.
Again, risking sounding as obnoxious, it gets me a bit miffed with the near obcession, when discussing smartphones in Lemmy, regardless of the community, with recommending flagship models or otherwise at least quite expensive ones, stating that anything else is garbage. I’m not shooting full lenght movies or taking the next prize winning wildlife photo with my phone.
My current personal phone is a Blackview BV5300+. It cost me less than 150€ and it gets the job done. Before that, I had an Oukitel WP8 Pro, another excelent phone, for less than 175€. Loaded with FOSS applications, they go the extra lenght, something I fear I won’t be able to do as easily with Google twisting the screws on Android. It is said you spend a little more to save a little more but this isn’t the case. I only need a basic phone and the hability to keep loading the applications I want and use on it.
Idk. All I got is two people who said they own a Pixel 8/9. But I don’t think that’s Lemmy’s obsession with expensive phones… It’s more due to the amount of computer nerds here. A Google Pixel combined with GrapheneOS used to be popular amongst that kind of people. Because it was one of the select few options to get rid of a good amount of all the spying and tracking by Google. In the future we’ll get the cooperation with Motorola. Maybe that’s going to provide us with more options. But they said “high-end smartphones” so it probably means just more expensive phones.
You do you. Just pick whatever phone satisfies your requirements and you’ll be fine. I usually pay something like 250-330€ for my phones and they last me about 5 years. I think that’s an acceptable price. But I wouldn’t pay that much for an additional phone, either.
(And by the way, a flagship phone is like 1000 bucks these days. Crazy pile of money for something like a phone, if you ask me.)