Need to upgrade, looking for recommendation.

[RVDowning]

I need to upgrade from my LG G4 to some other device. My phone has started deleting apps every time I boot. I'm looking for a recommendation regarding what I should upgrade to. It does not necessarily need to be LG. It should probably not be longer than six and a quarter inches though so that it can fit in my 7-in running pouch.

I should add though, that I would like the SD card to be accessible without having to open the case.

 

[Hadron]

As I said in another thread, there are almost no phones now where you can open the case (in the sense of the phone casing rather than an aftermarket case), so your last requirement probably isn't an issue.

You might find GSMArena's phone finder tool useful. That lets you specify your preferences in terms of size, year of release, storage and many other criteria, and then shows you what exists. It uses metric units, like most of the world, so you want to give the max height as 160mm rather than 6.25" (1 inch = 25.4mm).

If you want personal recommendations we may need more than "< 160mm tall", since even in these days of oversized phones that still leaves a lot of options (though you should avoid any that have "plus", "pro" or "ultra" in their names ). Do you like everything but the kitchen sink bundled into the software (the Samsung approach), or something more stripped-down? Do you have a maximum width you'd prefer? Or a minimum - basically do you want the largest thing that will fit in your pouch or something smaller? Since you talk about opening the case, is a removable battery actually important to you? If it is then these days that will leave you a small selection of low-end handsets and nothing else. If you tell us what's important to you it will be easier to make suggestions.

 

[bize32]

Huawei seems to be a market leader. Just waiting on playstore to be allowed.

My LG g8x dual screen and Note10 all burned sceens on dark themes and low light.... Not even 8 months.

Huawei seems to be a better quality

 

[Hadron]

Huawei seems to be a market leader. Just waiting on playstore to be allowed.

My LG g8x dual screen and Note10 all burned sceens on dark themes and low light.... Not even 8 months.

Huawei seems to be a better quality

How badly do you abuse your screens? I've never managed burn-in on an OLED panel. I've seen it in shop display phones, which have their screens on full brightness showing the same thing for weeks on end, but unless you do that sort of thing you must be really unlucky to have damaged screens so easily.

As for "market leader", that term has a well-defined meaning, and Samsung's global market share is twice that of Huawei (including their Honor brand as well as the Huawei brand). Xiaomi and Oppo are also bigger, and of course there's the other platform we don't talk about . So Huawei are popular, but they are definitely not the market leaders. And if Play Store is a problem for the OP I would not recommend buying Huawei in the hope that that will change at some point - that's a risk, and unless someone is happy to use Huawei without the Play Store it would be silly to gamble.

 

[RVDowning]

As I said in another thread, there are almost no phones now where you can open the case (in the sense of the phone casing rather than an aftermarket case), so your last requirement probably isn't an issue.

You might find GSMArena's phone finder tool useful. That lets you specify your preferences in terms of size, year of release, storage and many other criteria, and then shows you what exists. It uses metric units, like most of the world, so you want to give the max height as 160mm rather than 6.25" (1 inch = 25.4mm).

If you want personal recommendations we may need more than "< 160mm tall", since even in these days of oversized phones that still leaves a lot of options (though you should avoid any that have "plus", "pro" or "ultra" in their names ). Do you like everything but the kitchen sink bundled into the software (the Samsung approach), or something more stripped-down? Do you have a maximum width you'd prefer? Or a minimum - basically do you want the largest thing that will fit in your pouch or something smaller? Since you talk about opening the case, is a removable battery actually important to you? If it is then these days that will leave you a small selection of low-end handsets and nothing else. If you tell us what's important to you it will be easier to make suggestions.

I don't know that I much like the idea of having to throw away a several hundred phone just because the battery went dead instead of just replacing the battery. Manufacturers must love this. Although I don't know what the expected battery life is of phones these days.

I don't use the vast majority of junk that comes bundled in the software. It is also annoying that these items can't even be removed. If I need software I can always install it.

If the phone length is 6.25 in or less than I would expect the width not to be an issue - nor the depth.

I rarely use the cameras. I had to take photos for storm damage for the insurance company once, and on occasion I have to send a photo of a driver's license or some such somewhere. Plus, on occasion, there are the obligatory marathon related photos.

I use it mainly for music while running, Facebook, messaging, email, tracking some crypto prices, banking deposits, cash sending apps, notes, various running related apps, google directions, etc. No games. Nothing exciting.

And as I've mentioned before, I need external SD card access.

I know. Kind of boring.

 

[Hadron]

I don't know that I much like the idea of having to throw away a several hundred phone just because the battery went dead instead of just replacing the battery. Manufacturers must love this. Although I don't know what the expected battery life is of phones these days.

That depends on how often you charge it and how much you abuse it.

Without taking special measures (just sticking the phone on charge overnight) my phones generally last 4-5 years before the battery life becomes really problematic. I suspect that these "100W fast charging" schemes which the bloggers and marketing types seem to think are a good thing would reduce that.

Of course you can replace the battery in these phones, but it requires taking the phone apart. Some are easier for that than others (you can find information on this for many models from the iFixit website). Or you can pay someone to do it.

The manufacturers have decided that this is what people want, and "the market" doesn't offer an alternative because they all do it. Maybe if enough people had just refused to buy sealed phones it wouldn't have gone this way, but as they all did it at around the same time really the customer wasn't given much choice. That ship has long sailed.

I don't use the vast majority of junk that comes bundled in the software. It is also annoying that these items can't even be removed. If I need software I can always install it.

Actually removing it wouldn't help as much as you think: since the pre-installed stuff lives in a different partition (which is why you can't remove it) you wouldn't get the space back even if you did remove it (I used to root my phones and do just this, so I know from experience that this is true).

The annoyance is when they don't let you disable it - in principle they are only supposed to do that for stuff that's genuinely essential (to stop people breaking their phones by disabling things that actually are important), but I've seen major manufacturers, never mind carriers, protect pure junk that they've been paid to pre-install from being disabled.

If the phone length is 6.25 in or less than I would expect the width not to be an issue - nor the depth.

You are more tolerant of wide phones than I am then

I rarely use the cameras. I had to take photos for storm damage for the insurance company once, and on occasion I have to send a photo of a driver's license or some such somewhere. Plus, on occasion, there are the obligatory marathon related photos.

I use it mainly for music while running, Facebook, messaging, email, tracking some crypto prices, banking deposits, cash sending apps, notes, various running related apps, google directions, etc. No games. Nothing exciting.

And as I've mentioned before, I need external SD card access.

I know. Kind of boring.

So Pixels, OnePlus, the Galaxy s21 series are out because they don't have microSD cards at all.
But for your needs you don't actually require a high-priced flagship anyway. A midranger with a large battery will do fine - I say "large battery" because if you don't have to charge it so often I'd expect the battery to last longer. The only downside to that strategy is that you probably won't get software support for as long (this is why I stop at "midrange", because the cheaper devices will rarely have a decent software support period).

So my first thought along those lines was a Samsung M series (reasonable specs, inexpensive, very large batteries). But if you get annoyed by junk apps Samsung are far from the most streamlined (though LG are also prone to non-minimal software loads). The Samsung XCover Pro ("tough" phone) even has a removable battery (there are still a few that do, though not many). Moto do a few possibles, and add less stuff to their ROMs, but their software support will be shorter. The only LGs I could find released in the last year that met your size spec and had microSD slots were very low-end, which probably isn't what you want if you want the phone to last a few years.

But really I recommend having a play with that search tool I linked and see for yourself what exists. As it will only show 70 results you may need to narrow things further (by brand if you can't think of any spec that would matter). Your constraints are at least less out of step with the market than mine (I'm not interested in any phone > 7cm wide, while the market is now mostly things of the size we used to call "phablets", so my options are very limited indeed).

 

[RVDowning]

Thanks much for your long and detailed response.

I gave up on the phone finder tool. Too many parameters that I don't care about, but it seems that the Show button only lights up if options are selected from each category. I don't even know what some of the options are.

The only other thing that might be nice would be wireless charging. Guess I'll start Googling around.

 

[RVDowning]

Okay, I'm looking at the Samsung Galaxy M51. Do you see any negatives there?

To update, I did order the M51.