Be Excellent To Each Other

That still sets my Billy Connolly Alert Light flashing.

I appreciate I've effectively been paying that much via the contract system, but there's something about that amount of cash upfront for a smartphone that I instinctively recoil from. Especially since, fundamentally, nothing that's out there now is any better than my S7.

I could build a new media centre PC with some reasonable gaming ability for that sort of cash.

Ah, but could you build a phone?

You wouldn’t download a phone...

I would.

And a policeman.

There's your answer. A new S7

There's a good chance you've been paying more than that through your contract. If you're going to 'instinctively' recoil from something despite knowing the truth then there's probably not much anyone can do for you; you're making decisions (and moaning about stuff) based on weird factors at that point. Not that I expect this knowledge to stop you moaning about it mind.

£560 is a huge amount of money to pay for a phone, I think is his point.

And he's not wrong. Rather than adding in animated emojis or making the screen curved I think people would be much happier if phone companies worked on bringing the price down.

People pay that for vacuum cleaners.

I have no point to make.

Oh except I’m the same with vacuum cleaners as he is with phones.

Do they pay that while putting the existing, perfectly-working vacuum cleaner back into its box and onto a shelf, though?

Absolutely. On reflection, I shouldn't have gone for the Pixel 2 on contract as it added a fair amount to my monthly bill. The problem was, the Nokia wasn't that much cheaper.

You are essentially getting a pretty nice laptop to carry around in your pocket though and £500 for a laptop isn't bad.

EDIT: this was a reply to the 'phones cost money' post

Except it's not. Is my point.

For such an incredibly capable device that sees so much use and fits in your pocket I don't think £560 is at all 'a huge amount'; certainly not relative to what he likely paid for his existing device on contract, and not even to flagship phones in general as they've been sitting around the £600 mark for years. If you want a new but cheaper phone then there's plenty of mid-range options in the Android space and there's always the choice to just keep your existing phone; no one's forcing you to upgrade after all.

I've posted the sums previously in this thread somewhere, due to the way MT's pricing works, it ends up cost-neutral to either get a phone on contract, or go SIM-only and buy the phone outright (like, literally within a tenner either way last time I worked it out).

As such I haven't been paying any more for the phone by being on contract, but I have effectively paid full retail price, so I take your point in that regard.

The other factor in play now is I honestly think we've hit 'peak phone', and indeed have been there for a while. A mate got an iPhone X for Christmas and I've had a play around with it, it's very nice but it's still just a smartphone. Even he says he was completely happy with his old iPhone 6 Plus and doesn't feel the X is really that much different. (He didn't particularly want it, but his partner got it for him as a present.)

I look at other phones and don't really see that they do anything different/better than my S7. Certainly not £500+ better.

Well yes, that's what I'm doing.

I still think £629 is silly money though, that's just gouging on the profit margin, since Huawei and the like appear to be able to kick out largely identical devices for half that.

Loathe as I am to justify purchases, I got the S7 Edge as the reviews said the s7 camera was The Best and if I didn't get the edge I would look at the s7 every day and wish I'd have gotten the Edge. It is a lovely piece of stuff. Then, the ephemeral nature of art (like the time the group I am with projected the 3 Little Pigs from a cottage over the road on to another one, and did the same with another but with a future house vibe) kicked in and it died and Samsung want £280 to fix. So I haven't yet bothered. The point is I guess that people are happy to pay a premium and it might be more affordable to some than others. For a device I used a lot, I loved it

I wish I were as rich as you.


"Flagship" phones are rarely much better than the midrange phones (or the low-end phones, depending on your metrics) - they all do basically the same thing. Phones have gotten far too expensive recently, but people seem to write it off because advertising has drummed it into their heads that this is okay.

I'd be more than happy to get a mid range phone but the camera always seems to suffer too much compared with a flagship.

If my next phone could be mid range and have similar picture quality to my s7, I'd be all over it.

I use my phone probably more than any other object in my life. It entertains me on journeys, it keeps me connected and informed, it's invaluable when navigating on holiday, it takes pictures of a hilariously high quality and gives me access to my music collection on the go. To me that's easily worth a few hundred quid every couple of years. If that value proposition doesn't work for you personally then, well, .

Your S7 has a similar picture quality to your S7, I suspect

I absolutely agree it's worth a few hundred quid every couple of years.

I would like to point out that the Xiaomi Mi A1 comes with vanilla android + regular updates, has a lovely big screen, excellent build quality, battery life, performance and has fast charging over USB-C, and it's $230. If you want a budget phone that is gimmick free, but ticks every box you could reasonably want, that's the one you should get.

Has a 3.5mm port too.

Camera is only OK though. It has two rear sensors, but performance in low light is rather lacking.

Ha true. Perhaps that is the solution. Get a new s7 once the battery in this one gets unbearable. As long as it continues to get OS updates then all is dandy (aside from the the continued pernicious presence of Samsung guff)

Or just a new battery?

I was quite happy puttering along with an old phone on a sim only contract ... it seems like a good way to go, and then when the time comes to finally upgrade it seems like a huge great big leap.

I've recently gone iPhone 4S - nexus 5X, back to an iphone 5 and now a Galaxy S9.

First impressions are very positive, but I'm coming to it from a phone that's about 5 years old. I'd hope this S9 will last for a good while.

Didn't realise that was possible!

If the S7 is anything like the iPhones, they're not user-replaceable, but you should be able to get a new battery fitted by Samsung and it'd be cheaper than a new handset.

This is entirely my point, the Pixel 2 is not a £600 phone, it's a £300-£400 phone that Google are charging £629 for.

I remember when I got my Nexus 5 it was actually 'free' on a £35 per month contract, at the price of the Pixel 2 it'd be £250-£300 upfront as well.

This is the kind of horseshit that only Apple were previously able to get away with.

Your claim that it's a £300-400 phone is completely arbitrary though. It's the same price and same spec as the Galaxy S8 for example. It's the top end Google phone, why wouldn't they price it equivalent to the top end market leader?

DO NO EVIL.

EDIT - DON'T BE EVIL.

I nearly got it right.

I don't think that they have ever claimed to not be capitalists.

I'm not convinced Do No Evil directly correlates to Sell Your Best Phone to Hearthly Cheaper.

I guess I don't have a problem with them selling a phone at any price, although it is a shame that they no longer manufacture excellent £200-400 phones like they used to.

They've dropped that now anyway, implicitly admitting they are evil after all.

Indeed, the lack of a midrange device is more disappointing than the price of the top-end device.

I think you mean "It's the only Google phone".

Somehow, it's already 25% of the way through it's lifecycle.


Because, after owning four (I think) of them, I've come to the conclusion that Google really don't know how to make phones.

Yeah, maybe I should have said "it's a top end spec phone".

Phone lifecycle is where the cost hits hard - but then most top end phones can be sold for around £200 by the time most people upgrade.

Unless your mate's wife nicks it

Well it should.

I guess I'm just nostalgic for the Nexus 5, which was a midrange priced phone with a high-end feature set, processor, screen etc.

You can have it back soon!

I'm just waiting on Google to say "Yeah, okay, we'll fix your 6P". It's taken them a week to type that so far, though.

That was certainly their finest hour.

That one lasted the entire two-year contract before it stopped working!

Try saying "Ok Google" before you ask them

Aw, I've already written to them today. I'll do that tomorrow.

Can't fail.

Change of plan.

Hearthly Jnr's old Moto-G V2 is very much end-of-life now, obviously it stopping getting Android updates about three centuries ago, the storage is all maxed out, it's slow and clonky, and we can't even install stuff like the Battle.net authenticator on it due to old OS. The battery is totally spannered as well.

As such I have renewed my contract and got a shiny new Sony Xperia XA2 for 'free', which she can have.

It won't even have a SIM card in it, she just uses her phone in the house on wifi as a mini-tablet, camera, email client, YouTube viewer and suchlike. She has a Google account and she loves the way her photos sync up to Drive so she can get to them straight away on her PC, for example.

The XA2 is a brand new phone and has reviewed pretty well, comes with 'Oreo' out of the box and has a very good camera on it by all accounts.

I'll see if I can get another two years out of the S7.

I'm curious why you'd give her the new phone rather than handing the S7 down?

I'm not sure the XA2 is necessarily any 'better' than the S7, and it'll be nice for Jnr to get something new as opposed to handed down.

Plus, the S7 has got all my authenticators on it and I've got it set up just the way I want it (well, apart from when Samsung decide to move things around or put extra shit on it), so I wouldn't much relish setting up a new phone anyway.

Apart from Samsung's shittery I think the S7 is a fantastic phone, if it lasts another two years I'll be more than happy to keep it for that long.

Fair enough, I had assumed the XA2 was a new flagship phone but now I actually look at the specs the S7 does beat it in most areas.

The S7 will definitely last another two years if you keep it plugged in the whole time.

Affordable

http://www.cheshirerepaircentre.co.uk/s ... rvice.html

The battery is holding up OK to be fair, but yeah, not sure what state it'll be in after another two years.....

Got the XA2 set up for Jnr last night, for all the world it feels like a high-end smartphone to me, the screen in particular is superb.

Sony have done an admirably 'light touch' job on Android, and there's also an option as part of the initial setup to choose what extra apps you want installing. I don't know if this is Google mandated now or a Sony thing, but it allowed me to simply deselect all the Sony apps so all that's on there is Google stuff.

Beyond that is was pretty much just a case of logging in with her Google account, letting the various updaters do their thing, making sure Drive/Photos/Camera/etc all had permission to what they needed, that Drive was backing up new photos OK and suchlike.

USB-C is good (it goes in either way, fnaaar), but we only have one USB-C cable in the house, the one that came with the phone.

We took a few test photos and the quality is excellent.

So yes, nothing thrilling, but as a £300 phone it makes the idea of a £600 phone pretty silly IMO.

Certainly if my S7 breaks in the next two years I'll be replacing it with something in the £250-£300 bracket.