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Help First cell phone, recommend me something

The problem here is that all of the stuff that's big on the inside and biggest with developer support is also bigger on the outside, something that the OP doesn't want.

I'm sure that a smaller alternative exists but I'm not sure which one would fill the rest of the bill. :dontknow:
Exactly... I would have to say the N5 or the 2014 Moto G/X. (possibly the 2015 G as it looks to be a significant upgrade from the previous versions.) Strictly speaking as relates to screen size and support.
I understand the OPs concern but there's some larger screen devices like the HTCs that do have the larger screen but seem to have lengthened the device to keep it one hander friendly(Or at least it feels like it).
Going back to the "its like buying a car" statement... The OP needs to go to an electronics store and "test drive" some devices.
Actually holding a dummy phone or live model is something I've always done. I like to get a feel of the build quality, how easy it is to hold and if I can reach all necessary buttons and touch points one handed, how well it fits in my pocket etc.
I mean a large number of our community are average Joe's and I always encourage people to please do your research before buying or committing to a subsidy on a contract. Buying a new phone is a significant investment for a lot of people and believe me there's lots of buyers remorse and sour Sam's out there that bought something they just don't like.
(I bought TWO devices at launch without any research and were by and far the worst/most challenging devices I've ever owned the Droid X and the HTC Thunderbolt...well those were two expensive lessons learned. I'm sure some of you can relate lol.)
 
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Well if you are going in the low end market, careful what you buy because they tend to be a bit underspec'd if not outdated on the OS version.

Moto G would probably be decent...though it is a bit old and the camera sucks.

Here's what I did...my mom recently got the HTC Desire 610 which is a surprisingly nice phone, decent camera for its price and it's pretty attractive. She likes it.

I also recommend checking out Blu Phones...they have some attractive hardware at a reasonable price.

My grandfather has a Blu vivo something and it was less than 200 dollars and it is absolutely beautiful.

On the other hand, my grandma just got her first smartphone and she has a Lumia Windows Phone. She had an android phone and she found it complicated to use it not to mention the phone kept slowing down and her battery life was awful because she had to keep closing apps. She has a windows phone and it works great for her(plus the resizing of tiles, makes it easier for to see even better vs a bunch of static icons).
I've seen and played with some of the Blu devices... Even though they're inexpensive I personally wouldn't go that route... Just that they seem kind of flimsy and under speced. I mean for the same money you can get an unlocked Moto G, Samsung Avant and some others.
 
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I've seen and played with some of the Blu devices... Even though they're inexpensive I personally wouldn't go that route... Just that they seem kind of flimsy and under speced. I mean for the same money you can get an unlocked Moto G, Samsung Avant and some others.
True but a Samsung Avant really isn't that good(that's the tmobile phone right?) There are some newer phones that came out that I think is like 199...it's called the zenphone I think
 
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Yes, that is true, but I didn't know it was a bad thing.
The OP mentioned that he preferred to avoid carrier branded phones.
The Verizon logo is your guarantee that whatever bootloader/rooting help may come from a manufacturer will not be available for any phone from any manufacturer beyond a Nexus, and the Developer Edition guarantees the opposite - that you can do as you want.

Always check to see if a phone will work on your network -

http://www.willmyphonework.net/

And go to swappa.com to check any phone's ESN before buying.

Speaking of which, swappa is probably a more popular place to look for used phones.

We have a classified section, it's not as popular as it once was, but it's another good one to put on your watch list.

http://androidforums.com/forums/classifieds.149/

We've seen a lot of complaints about eBay purchases as well as some success stories, so avoid scams. Never pay as a gift or any other way that will remove your rights to a refund, if available.
 
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I am searching for a Moto X 2013, 32gb version, unlocked, unbranded, in Canada. This hard to find! I saw a couple of Verizon version...

How much should I pay for the 32gb version?

What is the downside of buying used? Performance loss, warranty, etc? How do I know if the device is permanently unlocked?
The older the phone, the harder to find. You're probably seeing more Verizon phones at the moment due to contracts ending and people being eligible for newer phones.

How much is really hard to say - I don't have a blanket opinion on that one.

You may expect to see a performance loss in the battery at two years - otherwise, performance ought not be affected, the silicon ought not wear out so shortly.

To ask for advice on specific models and what they may entail, you can also ask in the various forums for them if no one here knows.

http://androidforums.com/categories/android-phones.3/
 
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Thank you for the link WilMyPhonework.com. I was searching for something like this!

I don't really need to worry about ESN if I buy a brand new phone, right?

Speaking of battery life, I think I should buy a new phone. Battery performance begin to decrease apparently after 2 years or so, and I guess the majority of used Moto X 1st gen for sale were used for 2 years... Not really future-proof.

It seems that the 32gb version of the Moto X is only available to the developper edition.

So is there a good reason why I should buy an unbranded xt1053 (279$) over a Verizon branded xt1053 (219$) ? EarlyMon, I didn't really got what you meant when explaining the Verizon/Dev edition support.
 
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You don't have to worry about the ESN with a new phone. Only stolen or unpaid phones get the ESN blacklisted.

Sorry for how badly I worded the Verizon explanation.

Developer Edition phones are made for the user to unlock and play to heart's content with rooting. So are a number of other phones without that title.

Verizon-branded phones are the most locked down and difficult to root and deal with - unless it's a Developer Edition model.

Verizon-branded, Developer Edition is confusing because of the conflict in terms. In such a case, the Developer Edition part wins - just make sure that is what you really get if you go that route.

The unbranded phone is worth the extra money in terms of your time and less headaches unless you're a Verizon customer.
 
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For a good alternative 2013 phone that you can get new, root easily, and has an active development community at this time, how about the HTC One M7?

You can still get those new -

http://www.amazon.com/HTC-M7-Unlocked-Quad-Core-Smartphone/dp/B00BM4FJFY

http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one-5313.php

http://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one/development

That's an Android in the opposite direction of the 2013 Moto X.

The X featured great performance with less software running on an advanced dual core processor, 720p screen, and on screen buttons.

The M7 featured great performance with more software running on a quad core processor, 1080p screen, and two hard buttons.

Just trying to find you a new alternative to a used Verizon phone in Canada...
 
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Would the Xperia Z3 compact be a good alternative? Of course, the Z3c and Moto X 1st gen are not competing in the same league, but I was wondering if it was a viable option, knowing what I expect from a smartphone. I may be wrong, but chances are that prices will drop this summer for this model because of the new model coming out.
 
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Indeed, the M7 is very interesting. The specs are very similar to the Moto X.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying "an Android in the opposite direction". You mean it is a less "stock" Android experience? But can't we clean up useless software once it is rooted (not just disable)?
Only some of the specs are similar - 2 GB RAM and 32 GB storage and I would consider those very important.

It's easy to be set on needing stock Android, especially if you read a lot of the industry press. Stock Android fans insist that it's the best.

However - many find OEM enhancements to be far more preferable, indeed I'm one of them. If you were to go with an M7, the first rom I'd recommend would be Viper, it's HTC Sense on steroids -

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2334294

More than a few of the great, breakthrough, stock Android features showed up in HTC Sense first.

Sense isn't just a skin, it's its own branch of Android featuring interconnected apps and under the hood changes to support them.

That said, I disabled Facebook as useless - Facebook fans like my brother think I have a screw loose. I replaced my desktop (launcher) with Nova because it has more features.

Samsung TouchWiz goes even further in the opposite direction from stock and includes even more features out of the box - and it's TouchWiz, not stock Android, that is the most popular and best selling.

So whether Sense is useless or not is in the eye and hand of the beholder. The left side panel of the GSM Arena specs link I posted earlier links to comparisons of the M7 and three of the top non-stock contenders of that time. I think that you may find those enlightening as a set, and may help you in your decision. Together they provide a point of view that doesn't look at Android strictly in terms of the stock experience.

You can always choose to dump Sense altogether for an alternative like Cyanogenmod, or you can go directly to stock Android but retain the HTC hardware feature support for the Boomsound stereo speakers, you can have that as the HTC was one of the few that also came in a Google Play Edition (GPE) model, introduced and discussed earlier by @starkraving -

http://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one/development/rom-google-play-edition-lollipop-v1-00-t2963927

That dev also produced a "plus" version of the GPE rom giving back more Sense features.
 
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Would the Xperia Z3 compact be a good alternative? Of course, the Z3c and Moto X 1st gen are not competing in the same league, but I was wondering if it was a viable option, knowing what I expect from a smartphone. I may be wrong, but chances are that prices will drop this summer for this model because of the new model coming out.
Unlike the other phones we've discussed, I haven't used a Z3 Compact so I only know what I've read and heard and my word ought to count for a lot less.

http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Sony-Xperia-Z3-Compact_id8744

However, I think that @Slug or @El Presidente have some solid Sony experience so I've tagged them to see what they can tell you.
 
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I never did like OEM skins though I do think HTC is the most polished and has evolved the most and has a more practical suite of OEM apps. (Probably because it was one of, if not the first OEMs to use their own skin.) Blur,Touchwhiz and whatever that awful UI LG has are just plain ugly IMO.

According to most "purists" if you will, OEM skins are just resource hogs. (system partition/ram) Which I think really held true until recent years when we started seeing hardware evolve the way it has. Again I'm a little biased as I do prefer an AOSP experience.

So this goes back to my point about researching the development of the phone you're interested in to make sure they have a mix of various roms.

The Droid Incredible for example that (a Sense based experience & my favorite Droid branded phone ever) I had years ago had a massive amount of development. It had a variety of Sense roms, AOSP offerings, Sense(less) stock options, mods for days and days. I mean you could have literally spent months flashing all the roms and mods that device had.

Again just comes down to what you want/need because at the end of the day everything you read from the rest of us is just personal opinions and preference.
 
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^ This!

Android is not just one thing, and Android is all about choice.

Odd as it may sound, on my phone prior to this one, I ran HTC Sense during the week and my favorite stock roms on the weekend. And despite running Viper on my M8 and thinking it's the bees knees, I still flash others from time to time to see what else is possible.

Around here that behavior is considered quite normal. :D
 
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^ This!

Android is not just one thing, and Android is all about choice.

Odd as it may sound, on my phone prior to this one, I ran HTC Sense during the week and my favorite stock roms on the weekend. And despite running Viper on my M8 and thinking it's the bees knees, I still flash others from time to time to see what else is possible.

Around here that behavior is considered quite normal. :D
I remember asking a dev years ago if your phone has a limited number of flashes before it kills over lol.
 
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Around here that behavior is considered quite normal. :D

Hehe, well that's good to hear, because that's exactly why I want an Android phone and not a iPhone or Microsoft. Phones became, like computers, almost an extension of your mind! The idea of NOT having control over how your "mind" works scares me. That just doesn't make sense that part of your mind is controled by Verizon or Rogers or whatever. Howerver I know that it is hard even impossible to be completely free of all that big market hand. What you do on your phone is probably monitored or at least CAN be somehow. You can be paranoid and think that the government is tracking your every moves :p But they probably can...

So that's why I take my time to understand how everything of this works... I don't wanna make a bad move, and I don't want chineses children to make a phone for me every year. Without speaking about the huge pollution it creates. Yeah, this is really a shitty industry selling expensive ephemeral devices engineered to break.

Yet nobody can deny the benefits of owning one... This is where I stand now!

A little too deep for this thread!
 
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Would the Xperia Z3 compact be a good alternative? Of course, the Z3c and Moto X 1st gen are not competing in the same league, but I was wondering if it was a viable option, knowing what I expect from a smartphone. I may be wrong, but chances are that prices will drop this summer for this model because of the new model coming out.

Unlike the other phones we've discussed, I haven't used a Z3 Compact so I only know what I've read and heard and my word ought to count for a lot less.

http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Sony-Xperia-Z3-Compact_id8744

However, I think that @Slug or @El Presidente have some solid Sony experience so I've tagged them to see what they can tell you.

Not had time to read through the thread so unsure of your exact requirements, but....

I've used an Xperia Z1 for the past 20 or so months and until recently, I loved it. Whilst I can't personally vouch for the Z3 Compact, I know 3 friends with one and they all love it (although they migrated from iOS/Windows so they would probably love any high end Android device).

Sony's UI is relatively light (probably the closest to stock Android I've seen any OEM use) and on my Z1, a lot of their preinstalled bloatware is installed to /data so can be safely uninstalled if you don't use it.

Whilst not amazingly fast, they have been relatively good with updates.

The camera is great, it has removable storage and battery life is apparently superb.

If unlocking bootloader is your thing, don't get a network locked variant as generally speaking, you can't unlock the bootloader if the device is SIM Locked (even after unlocking for all networks).

They also have a pretty decent dev community.

Tl;dr, Sony are very good and if the Z3+ came with a bigger screen, that would be my upgrade.
 
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Hehe, well that's good to hear, because that's exactly why I want an Android phone and not a iPhone or Microsoft. Phones became, like computers, almost an extension of your mind! The idea of NOT having control over how your "mind" works scares me. That just doesn't make sense that part of your mind is controled by Verizon or Rogers or whatever. Howerver I know that it is hard even impossible to be completely free of all that big market hand. What you do on your phone is probably monitored or at least CAN be somehow. You can be paranoid and think that the government is tracking your every moves :p But they probably can...

So that's why I take my time to understand how everything of this works... I don't wanna make a bad move, and I don't want chineses children to make a phone for me every year. Without speaking about the huge pollution it creates. Yeah, this is really a shitty industry selling expensive ephemeral devices engineered to break.

Yet nobody can deny the benefits of owning one... This is where I stand now!

A little too deep for this thread!
On the contrary, I think that those are the exact issues facing all Android users that really care about using a phone as a personal data assistant.

But as for privacy - you can try and that's a not a bad thing at all. Just remember that there are limits beyond your control. The instant you activate the phone, you've already profiled yourself as a particular user type to your carrier, and so long as you have cell service, your carrier knows your approximate location even on a dumb phone. And Google and any other search engine (and indeed many sites) will track and profile you even with Ghostery and ad blocking and many other blocks you'll try for - anything short of an anonymous VPN and you were tracked on your way to going for that. LOL - it's not a perfect world but you don't have to leak information like a sieve either.

Personally, I'd consider it an honor for the government to track my every move (talk about a waste of impossible resources lol there's only a lot of us) - I wish the kids did! rotf!

Meanwhile, you're actually in the majority wanting your phone to last longer. You may note that there are a lot of complaints that each year, the changes aren't drastic from last year's model. This is the first year that I can remember a whole lot of people complaining on the news blogs that this year's models aren't exciting enough to upgrade from last year's. With the steep cost of phones at retail in Europe and the typical 2-year contract in the US, I think we're seeing manufacturers mostly targeting the two-year buying cycle crowd.

Android isn't like it was not many years ago. The OS is a compact, real-time Linux and it's always needed better processor and RAM resources - now we have them. And the OS itself has moved out of the new-and-exciting-feature phase into the sustainability and supportability phase. New features are coming but they're going to be just that - features - not essential changes to protect the system and make it fulfill promises like it was years past.

Just my opinions. ;) :)

PS - big tip of the topper to @El Presidente!
 
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I think that @Slug or @El Presidente have some solid Sony experience so I've tagged them to see what they can tell you.

You rang, M'lord? :D

Would the Xperia Z3 compact be a good alternative?

After 27 months of trouble-free use with an Xperia Z, and as someone who sells smartphones. here is my take:

Basicaly, I want a phone that:

- won't be annoying to carry around but yet, has a decent screen size (4.5" to 5" maybe?).
- CPU and RAM enough to have a smooth and durable experience over time.
- GPS (wich is pretty much a standard i guess and don't have to mention it)
- External storage for mp3, movies and stuff
- Decent camera
- Good battery maybe?

The 4.5" IPS Triluminous display of the Z3C is one of the best on the market. It might not have the ultimate 'punch' of an AMOLED but the colour rendition i.e. realism is imho unsurpassed. It gives nothing away to its big brother other than visible area.

The Snapdragon 801 with 2GB RAM is more than adequate for anything bar demanding HD gaming.

GPS support is, as you guessed, standard in all smartphones. The Z3C supports both GPS and GLONASS, as well as A(ssisted)-GPS via wifi/mobile data for increased precision.

MicroSD cards up to 128GB are supported. Also external USB storage via USB-OTG (some retail handsets include an OTC cable in the box).

The 20.7MP Exmor RS sensor is the same as found in the RX100 APS-C camera. Coupled with the latest iteration of the Bionz image processing engine (as found in the Alpha=series dSLRs), the Superior Auto mode that matches the actual scene with an internal database of several dozen presets to find the best settings, low-light capability down to ISO12800, and a large selection of creative camera apps. the Z3C has a lot to commend it to the keen smartphone photographer.

Sony's Stamina Mode extends the already-impressive 2-day average-use battery life by restricting background data usage to a list of user-defined whitelisted apps. Ultra Stamina Mode can take this even further.

That's not to mention the IP68 rating of the handset. I'm an outdoors person, and my Z has survived summer thunderstorm drenchings, winter snow, and year-round drops into Highland bogs. "O noes. I haz mud on my phone... let me wash it off in the nearest stream!" :D

If this comes over as a sales pitch, I apologise. I owe nothing to Sony other than customer satisfaction, but after two HTCs, a Samsung and a Sony I'm eagerly awaiting delivery of my shiny new Z3+. Yes, I'm that impressed with their Android devices.
 
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