Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities:
I think Sony allows the bootloader to be unlocked, so i would go for the new Xperia 10 vii and just put a beefy case on it to be honest. Not only does it have the 3,5mm jack, but also SD card slot, no stupid punchhole/camera cutout, has a good battery, is a 'normal' size (6.1"). If i didn't went with the Fairphone 6, i'd go for that one.
Those rugged phones are falling short in many ways, and most of them are pricey too. And Motorola isn't what they used to be, sadly.
That goes on the short list. Thank you!
Honourable mention for the Xperia 1V as well, worth the price if you can get one refurbished (Unfortunately there's a bit of bloat but if you're looking to have your own OS on it then not an issue)
I am a big fan of my xperia 5v. Yes, its not current but its still a great size, great battery, removable storage, ip rated, and has a headphone jack. You can probably get them cheaper now too. I think I paid $500 a year ago for mine when I was shopping it vs the 10vi.
Hear me out.
Get a Fiio KA5 (or similar).
It’s negligibly tiny.
It’s cheap.
It works between smartphones. You can keep it a decade+.
Now your headphones work with anything.
Sound clarity/noise floor/volume level is better than any phone.
Better sound quality from your PC. Or TV. Or anything.
Now your choice of phone isn’t so restricted, so you can find a deeply discounted one.
What’s the downside? I get some dongles being annoying, like the Apple ports meme, but this tiny thing has caused me precisely zero inconvenience and brought me tons of convenience.
I know these DACs are awesome. But I really like the option to plug directly into the phone. Especially since the only reason not to have that is so that Apple and Samsung can sell you crappy, overpriced Bluetooth buds.
It does plug directly into the phone! It literally just lives on my headphone cable, and it’s so light the 3.5mm cable is the basically same as with it off or on.
I suppose the only downside is if other using your phone want to plug in, and they happen to not have the dongle. Or if you want it for an older car maybe.
You're asking for something that was already becoming rare 10 years ago.
Are you referring to the headphone jack or the sd card slot? Because geizhals.de shows 144 models having both running Android 15, ranging from 1500€ to under 100€ in price. Looks like plenty of options to me.
Consider you might be able to swap Volla's launcher for another one off the app stores. I don't know how whether this is supported but it is a thing you can do on a regular android device so I'd at least look into it
The current Moto G series (US market) has headphone jack, microsdxc slot, decent battery runtime, and fairly easy availability of replacement batteries. Missing some of the other stuff on your list, but I'm happy with my Stylus 5g 2023 model regardless. Someone in another thread said these models aren't being sold in the EU, but maybe you can import one somehow if that's where you are. For the US models, see: https://www.motorola.com/us/en/family/g.html
I doubt the added hassle of importing will be worth it. Those model numbers are really confusing. What would be the difference between the moto g56 5G that is available in the EU and the moto g stylus - 2025 that is available on the US site? The US site just says "Snapdragon® 6 Gen 3 Mobile Platform" for CPU which means absolutely nothing to me.
Gsmarena allows you to compare phones side by side, including benchmark results
Try versus.com . Put in your selection criteria, it'll give you a list of phones that meet that criteria. You can pull them up together to compare features, and they have an overall rating as well.
The BraX3 meets most of these, definitely not rugged tho: https://www.braxtech.net/product
That one looks amazing, thank you! Not sure I can hold out until December though.
Have you looked at the Murena phone options? https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
Only the Teracube seems to have a headphone jack, and as far as I can tell the Volla X23 would be the better option in every category.
It depends, I have a Teracube and I have zero complaints. I don't game on my phone or do anything else intensive
I'm using a Moto G Stylus 2023, about to upgrade to the 2025 version if they have a good sale on Black Friday. It has expandable storage with a Micro SD Card and a standard headphone jack, plus a built in stylus which is nice.
That phone honestly looks great...
But one huge downside for many: It seems only to be available in North America... :-(
Back then I chose a Motorola because I was told I comes with the least amount of garbage pre-installed, is this still true?
This was definitely still true for the Moto G72 I am using for almost three years now, but had already changed for the Moto G54 my girlfriend bought 1.5 years ago.
This one had several unwanted and unremovable crap apps preinstalled. One forced itself to the screensaver with a button you often accidentally pushed that then started downloading and showing animated screens that led to online ads when you clicked on them. Very hard to disable and would return after each Firmware update...
I couldn’t find it in the list of models LineageOS supports
And being a device with a Mediatek chipset it is unfortunately very unlikely to ever appear there.
Nokia XR21 has a headphone jack and is rugged.
If you want to run Lineage OS you can check the phones on this list.
But sadly no SD-card, that's a no-go with a paltry 128GB of storage. The XR20 does have an SD-card slot, but is 4 years old by now.
I have an AGM H6 since a time and it's a rugged simple phone with headphone jack. Also pretty affordable. I think I'm havig a problem with disabling gemini but otherwise pretty ok. Stands to note I do use another phone for gaming and such. So the AGM just handles comms and browsing.
If not I heard very good things about the blackview phones. Also rugged.
Get a separate dac. I love my Ifi Zen, its just so cool and hilariously impractical; bigger that the phone, two wires stickin out; accidental volume changes etc.
Blud I need a headphone jack so I can plug my earbuds so I can pick up a call without using my hands. I'm not using IEM or listening to 96 bitrate stuff
Seems my sales pitch didn't work. Did I mention you can duct tape the dac to the phone directly and get cavity searched at airports.
How thorough are those cavity searches while using that setup? Asking for a friend.
Go on...tell me more. What IEM do you prefer and is the search gloved or ungloved?
Shanling ME500. It starts gloved.
I think some of the Experias still have all that.
Yo check out the Galaxy xcover 7. Rugged, large battery, expandable storage, headphone jack, no huge camera array, from a reputable korean company. Looking at upgrading to this phone myself although I can't bear to let go of my Galaxy s10e
I always tried to avoid Samsung because of the amount of crapware pre-installed. Are the rugged versions better in this regard?
No idea, I didn't have much trouble with my galaxy though. I think most of the crap comes from the carrier versions so if they have a generic version it's not too bad.
The iKKO Mind One fills quite a few of your requirements, including headphone jack and SD card slot (through the optional keyboard case, which also includes a DAC), single camera that flips manually into a selfie camera, and comes with iKKO's alternative OS built-in (can also be removed prior to order) and will support bootloader unlocking to install third-party OS.
But it's a first-gen product not yet released, and fails several of your requirements. The battery is small (because it is a low power device with a very small screen), the company is based in China I believe or at least has strong connections there, and it's not a rugged phone. So maybe not ideal for you, but I thought I'd put it out there since not many people are aware of this phone yet and it is quite a niche device that is very appealing to some.
Otherwise, Sony are really the only mainstream manufacturer I'm aware of that still consistently has headphone jacks and SD card slots on their devices. Many others have one or the other, or are limited to both on cheap/low end devices. I'm not sure if Sony still allows bootloader unlocking, as their unlock tool only covers previous gen devices currently.
Iam planning to get Moto g100 again eventually. You can still get new ones from ebay.
I had one but i ended using the original ROM. You cant unlock the bootloader right away, and by the time I could unlock it, I had it alredy set up.
Then one day a charger failed and fried the phone.
I have g84 now and the g100 ran circles around it in terms of cpu. It also had video output on USB C which was handy.