so, tldr version first… need a phone thinking about getting either a S7(not s8) or essential phone. Dont care about specs… do care about the quality of the screen, battery life, rooting, modding and community support on the phone.
not so tl;dr version… about a year ago, I bought an lg v20 for the sake of having a quality headphone experience, but with the headphone i have (ATH m50x) i really didn’t notice a difference and to add insult to the injury the software experience was beyond awful, I have a terrible screen bleed issue which i cannot unsee. the battery sucks, i get 3 hours of screen on time. the updates are slow, still stuck on 7.0 with months of security updates yet to be received. to sum it up I FUCKING hate that phone. So, I’ve decided to buy a phone, never again I’m going with LG, but I looked up on my carriers website (Koodo, Canada) the two phones i can afford are essential phone and galaxy s7. things im looking for are 1) Excellent screen(s7>essential) 2)Battery Life* (unclear) 3) community support for the phone (so i can install custom firmware(unclear) 4) updates(unclear).Oh btw ill have to pay 120CAD upfront for s7 and 320CAD for essential 200CAD/320CAD depending on the plan.
S7 has a beautiful screen hands down.(obviously because of the manufacturer Samsung is good at it) but the part is if you have a carrier with Samsung you are going to struggle getting updates and they are going to feel very rare.
Essential phone is pretty new but it doesn’t look too good around their company as a whole. Its a new look with that camera notch. The titanium/ceramic back is too risky without a case. I feel like essential phone would be easy to mod but I’m not sure since this is there first (known commericalized) phone they have put out.
What I think your budget is, its around 500 USD which at that point I give the best choice of the oneplus 5 or if you can wait one more year then you can try to get oneplus 6 which looks pretty nice.
Essential phone is a beautiful phone, but it’s camera sucks big time. However, something that the Essential phone have is support for treble project (that will be fully supported with the update to 8.1) which gonna make it easy to flash AOSP rom to your phone and update it, and will help with community support too.
S7 for sure, but make sure you get the international version with the Samsung Exynos CPU. That will allow you to root and install ROMs as much as you like. The Snapdragon version sold in the US (not sure about Canada) has a very tightly locked bootloader.
So be sure to do plenty of googling on the exact model number that your carrier sells. If it’s a snapdragon phone, avoid it like the plague.
while i loved one plus 3t’s design the new 5t looks like an iphone clone . I cannot afford that phone, its the reason why im going with carrier contract so that i don’t have to pay a penny up front. 5t stars at 650CAD before taxes… thanks for the suggestion, but all my money now a days i going to the evil textbooks.
sure thats what i was thinking as well, but the cameras are beyond bad in low light and as far as the community support goes i think samsung version im getting is exynos varient, from what ive read online it seems that i might be able to pull off custom roms. fingers crossed on that…
Hard to say, I’m not really an intensive user. I only have to charge my S7 every 3-4 days. I suspect that with a normal usage pattern you’re looking at 1.5-ish days for the Samsung.
well thats good news, its better than 3 hours of screen on time, and essential phone i suppose should in theory have avg to below avg battery life due to bigger screen, ips panel, and about the same battery capacity.
If you care to import, there is a Hong kong verison of the S7 that has an unlocked bootloader and is snapdragon and there is TWRP and roms for it on XDA.
. I cannot afford that phone, its the reason why im going with carrier contract so that i don’t have to pay a penny up front. 5t stars at 650CAD before taxes… thanks for the suggestion, but all my money now a days i going to the evil textbooks.