that third one is my Blackberry Key 2, a phone I've been clinging to for years because it has a physical keyboard and shutter button and...Headphone jack? the cellphone market is so dire and doesn't respond to consumer demands at all. I'm dreading having to get a new one and find something not terrible.

the fourth and funniest category is all the android phones with a recognizable (sometimes dead) brand, made by a third party, all unvariably crap and vastly overpriced. polaroid, RED, leica, CAT (to a lesser extent), commodore etc etc etc

A lot of this comes down to the fact that Qualcomm is a monopoly, in that old school Intel "we don't even try anymore because who can compete" way. So there's literally no reason whatsoever to make a phone good because you can only ever get as good as Qualcomm can be bothered to shit out, and nobody who isn't Samsung or Apple can afford to make anything but just "a Qualcomm SoC with a screen attached". Well, Google probably could, but they don't even give a shit about their own damn platform enough to even guarantee updates for the Pixel.

a big reason for all the "lower-end" smartphone jank isn't even the SoC by itself - it's the storage. Android needs a shitload of I/O, because everything is cached behind caches of caches, and anything that isn't the S69+Pro FE is almost invariably loading a single-lane, 8-bit eMMC made from Emtec floor sweepings.

They dont seem to bother to make the build quality consistent for category 1 either. My girlfriend and I both got a Moto G Stylus phone at the same time and the USB-C charging port on hers is already basically dead. It's in that "the cable has to be at precisely the right angle or it doesn't charge" part of its lifespan. Mine's working just fine though.

there's also the $2000 foldable phone variant on #2. somehow already a generation out of date at launch, completely unreasonable price except to one guy in accounting that noticed every device breaks 4 times during the warranty period

if you reply to this and say anything about the iphone i will block you immediately

mine's grape

I stumbled through some of these before just getting a damn Pixel. I had a Moto G Power and was so disappointed by the camera, the photos just felt "soft", and it felt kinda slow when it was new. Before that I'd cycled through various... an S9+ that I really loved, and even fell back to as a dedicated camera when I had the Motorola. A Chinese phone from I think Umidigi? that I bought because it was such a good deal for the specs or whatever, and I think my entire ownership was trying to justify that to myself the whole time i owned it, until I left it in a pair of swim trunks when I jumped in the pool.

I eventually landed on a Pixel 6a, after a 5a whose screen died from a single crack... the 6a with a good case has met my needs, though somehow it doesn't feel as snappy as the S9, and it still lacks a headphone jack and a MicroSD card slot, and the battery doesn't last as long as I'd like... my dad has an S10+ he's pretty happy with, and my mother one of those insufferable budget Samsungs that she seems fine with.

If I could somehow get a glass-and-metal smartphone with a good camera, a headphone jack, microSD slot, and good battery, I'd be ecstatic- and it probably exists, somewhere in the Chinese or Indian market. But I'm not in a position to cycle through that many devices searching for "the one", so I just carry a battery pack for my Pixel, pay for Google Photos to mitigate the lack of MicroSD support, and simply deal with the lack of a physical headphone jack....

I've had three moto g phones and I've loved them dearly because they are exactly what you've described- just middle of the road android devices with no frills.

Every once in a while a glitch like the Galaxy Note10 Lite happens, I feel lucky I got it

just upgraded from a sony xperia xz1 compact to a sony xperia 5 iii because all android phones are either shit, overpriced shit, or shanzai shit, but at least a sony phone is weird sony overpriced shit.

so really the actual choice is: do you get the Moto G that has constant inexplicable problems connecting to any cellular network, or the Moto G that explodes like an action movie car if you try to open it?

Ill have you know, I pay $50 extra and get the moto g stylus. I doodle things with it. It is probably inferior to the leapfrog.

I actually kinda miss the E.

Yeah I had to look for a new android phone earlier this year and ended up with the same findings. Ended up going with the samsung galaxy whatever after throwing my hands up and accepting that if I want to meet my goal of "not having to upgrade again for a good while" I'd have to say goodbye to the headphone jack and other features that aren't popular these days.

But seriously who numbers these fucking things. I had a samsung... I think 9? galaxy 9? And now I have a galaxy 23 plus. I had that phone for a long time but I don't think I had it for.... what, 14 new phone versions?

The original Moto G and X were the perfect phones for their price points and we've only fallen further from the True Design goals ever since

and then there's the Samsung A2# series for below 300 where it cannot run more than one app at a time

last year i got sick of pixels and galaxys being overpriced bloated crap that i had to replace every two years or so when they would break or start running out of battery. sick of ports stopping functioning. sick of cell service that barely works. i dont give a shit about cameras, i dont care about processing power, or oled screens, or creepy ass face ID shit, or... fuckin whatever. i would just get a flip phone if i was sure they were compatible with discord and my bank and authenticator apps.

my criteria was headphone jack, microsd slot, water resistant, not entirely made of glass. ended up getting the nokia xr20 for five hundo and i gotta say. it is extremely mediocre in all the ways i wanted. one year in, it hasnt cracked, im always at 40% at the end of the day, and it turns out having a quick action button on top set to flashlight is the worlds greatest invention. thus it is my favorite phone ive ever had. i hope to have it for ten more years and run it into the ground

got a phone in the third category after being fed up with no major android brands meeting my criteria and got a Unihertz Atom L which I have been very pleased with. Just need something that can take calls, text, watch videos, listen to music (headphone jack), not be dead before the end of my classes, and ideally have a small footprint and it ticks all those boxes nicely, though it is a bit of a brick for being a 4" screen at least everything is easy to reach unlike my old Galaxy S8 which would probably be considered compact by now

There's also the "enterprise device" category, where the MSRP is 4800$, it has nearly all the features you're trying to find elsewhere, has years of updates, but doesn't seem available to the general public and requires all kinds of contracts.

you forgot "phone that had a decent price point, decent size, decent hardware, decent software, and was discontinued 5+ years ago to be replaced with a piece of garbage"

Number 3 reminds me of the old Google Tango stuff. Before we decided to do AR/positional tracking just using the built in cameras they were working on a suite of devices with a ton of sensors built in for pretty good positional tracking. Granted this was 9 years ago, idk how modern ar tracking stacks up. All that tech is built into the iPhone other phone brand nowadays, anyways.

I'm almost tempted at this rate to get a Zebra TC58 or TC78, damn the expense. They apparently get Android updates for the next several years, because Enterprise.

Got myself a Crosscall Core-X5, after i was tired of the last two Honor branded phones i previously owned breaking from a simple hip-height fall and getting run over by a hospital bed respectively.
This thing is a brick specifically made to be handleld in rough circumstances, with silicon protection caps on the usb and jack ports.
It's essentially the android phone version of a toughbook. Unfortunately it also has the same limitations: underwhelming hardware. The camera is just okay-ish after fiddling with the settings (default settings are "vga webcam from 1998"), and i'm starting to reach the point where there is sometimes lag while typing (we love our mis-inputs).
But heh. It has 4 configurable buttons aside from power/volume up/volume down, and i can literally use it as a talkie walkie if i want to. Also it has twice the battery capacity as a normal phone, and is often still at 60% after a day of normal use, or 40% after a 8-hour day of looking at the screen.

Miss my htc one m8 for this, had a built in radio receiver that used your headphones as an antenna. Now I want all phones to have this, but no phones do now thanks to removing the headphone jack

You forgot the 4th one. Foldables. Meh hardware, screen that folds but as a result can be damaged easily, cameras that can just about look fine if you spend 8 years in the settings of a 3rd party camera app.

sony almost falls into the third category because all their phones range from weird as hell to "wait, it has HDMI input?" or "oh they just plunked the sensor from a $1300 point and shoot into one of their phones, that's clever I guess." but they have a notoriously bad software support lifespan, refuse to sell half the models in the US and band-lock them so they're unusable here (I was dumb enough to buy an xperia 10 III and think it would work okay), and are consistently about $200 more expensive than they should be.

but hey, it's a taller phone that's more comfortable to hold, and they're dead simple to root and flash, so if nothing changes I'll keep buying the two-years-out-of-date flagship model every five years and enjoy microSD and a headphone jack into the future

there's also the bonus category of weird niche phones usually used for industrial or demanding professional work, like Bittium's ones which have some ridiculous security measures (and to my knowledge are supposed to be pretty much indestructible, on which if they can compete with my old Moto G3 i'll be impressed)