Old But Useful Phones

I'd like to start a discussion on old phones that are still kicking. Preferably cheap. The reasoning is, it's good to buy old electronics and recycle. It's also useful to have a backup phone. And let's be honest plenty of old flagships are more than powerful enoigh. 

 

Anyways let's set some criteria. 

They have to be GSM.

Must support current network standards.

 

 

 

I'll list a few to start.

Lumia 900

HTC One S and X

Optimus G

Nexus 4?

Nokia N9, it is an amazing phone and you can run a ton of operating systems on it.

Nexus 4 and 5 are both super hackable as well.

That's a no-brainer. HTC HD2.

The Nokia N900 is another goldie, if any nerd comes across one, grab it.

EDIT: The only weak spot of the N900 is the physically weak usb port, so applying a tad more solder to it is recommended. Broke mine off, and I wasn't the only one.

I'm typing this up with a nexus 4 .... You can find them in perfect quality (used) for ditcheap (sub $100 on eBay and cragslist) with brand new ones not much more. Hardware is more than enough for basic functionality all the way up to GPU intensive games.

My Nexus 7 (2012) received an official lollipop update from google so I suspect whatever the next version of Android is Google will release an official update for the nexus 4. If/when they don't expect to be able to flawlessly run at least one to two more versions of android by flashing custom Roms as unlocking the bootloader on a nexus phone takes seconds with any toolkit you pick up off of the XDA Forums.

This phone launched with android 4.2 o believe and I don't plan on getting rod of it till Android 6ish

I've got a couple old flip phones around I can use in an emergency...  I can't even remember what they are at this point.  Then again, my current phone (ST15i) is fairly old and still works perfectly fine.  So there's that I suppose.

Ever check out CrDroid? CM12 based rom quite stable and performs wonderfully if you want to jump to Lollipop

 

Yeah the N9 and N900 are pretty boss