Thread by @gravislizard

the cellular telephone market is miserable. let us begin

1) i do not want an iphone for reasons i do not wish to discuss. read: don't @ me

so, within android, there are some Problems. the first is of course samsung. there are 12,000 samsung phones for every other phone, possibly orders of magnitude more. i can only imagine there is a sovereign island in the pacific made of samsung phones.

there used to be cellphone stores. they appear to have evaporated. even best buy mobile is gone. car t oys has nothing (I think they used to sell phones?). fry's took out their phone displays.

the carrier stores only sell locked phones of course but even your own carrier store sucks for a dozen reasons, including the stock being
- 3 iphones
- 4 samsungs
- some tablets
- BLU Economyphone (Ice Cream Sandwich :))

best buy has 6 tables of phones. all of them are over half samsung. samsung produces an unfathomable number of models, all running the insufferable war crime that is touchpiss.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_G… do not get it twisted: samsung makes a *literally unfathomable* number of phones. it is impossible for any one person to know every model.

samsungs are literally unusable. besides the ruined UI, they come loaded with literally dozens of Softpedia-grade chinese crapware apps. I have no idea what the fuck is going on over at Samsung, but they need an intervention,.

so let's shove all the samsungs aside. at the best buy we also have multiple phones from vendors i've never heard of and, I expect, will never hear of again. Clearly ultra-budget models; no thanks.

what's left: a couple motorola phones, a couple LG phones, a couple Sony phones

the sonys are a mess. they look good, they feel good, but i think the UI is custom? i didn't look that deep into it tbh because i found they didn't have dual cameras, which at this point i particularly wanted, after i saw that on the iphone

more importantly, the one that hit all the marks i wanted (xz2 premium? idfk) has the fingerprint sensor nearly in the center of the back, vertically, which is awful.

there were other problems, i forgot about them because the human brain does not actually have enough working memory to make a fully informed decision in a market like this. it's impossible. there's no way to do it.

the motos were the G6, X4 and Z3 Play. the G6 is a respectable device in many ways but the dual cameras are used solely for fake bokeh, which doesn't excite me that much, and honestly? i wanted a higher-end device that wouldn't age so quickly

also the g6 is a little big; i realized recently that i don't really *want* something as big as the nexus 6p i had. this limits my options *tremendously*

it turns out that almost all the interesting features you can get on a phone now are exclusively on 6+ inch phones, and a number of the more appealing ones cloned the fucking iphone notch that nobody wants and which apps don't even understand.

So I'm intrigued, for instance, by Huawei's hilarious Leica-cobranded P20 which has a 40MP (no fucking way that isn't 'interpolated') *AND* a 20MP >MONOCHROME< sensor on the back. why? because god is dead and science is how we piss on his corpse. I *like* this hubris.

but it's 6+ inches and has a notch. it's also $750 but, if I'm completely honest, I was willing to find room in my budget for that. I have a little extra cash at the moment and while that would normally be an absurd price, well

Once in a while I wade into a market for something I can't really afford and say "hey, what if I was a king? what if i was a Duke of Dickshire and had infinite money, what would the princely option be?" and I'm just fucking *disappointed to death* by the market.

Consumer electronics are SO DISMAL. it's amazing. you can't actually spend money to solve any problems anymore. you can't shell out enough cash to make yourself not make rent in order to get something amazing. You can only buy shit, or shit with jewels in it.

I basically walked into the store with money I couldn't really afford to spend, ready to drop it, and they could not take my money. They had no instrument that would make me $700 poorer. I tried, and the market just fucked it up.

It's like this: You can buy an $89 phone, or a $250 phone, and those are all reasonable decisions. You can buy a $300-400 phone and those can be reasonable if you're careful. You can buy one for $500-700 but shit starts getting weird.

You start finding out strange shit like: it's $600, but it has a CPU from last year. It's $700, but the dual cameras can't be used independantly. It's $500, but the fingerprint reader is on the /side/?

It's $600 but it has no SD slot while others do. It's $500 but has no headphone jack while the $400 option does. And then there's personal limitations like screen size - tons of things are ruled out if you don't want a big phone.

The only remaining interesting option at the store was the Z3 which, man, what a mess. It does have the fingerprint reader on the side which is weird and awkward and would interfere with using a case, I'm sure, so I bet there are no cases for it.

But you can't get a case for it anyway because it has, a docking port,, . on the back ? where you can dock """"mods""""? and some of them are kinda interesting but not like this?

so like, there's an extra battery you can dock to it, which just makes it look like a thicker, completely normal phone. that's a neat idea, but it's $89 and you can't put a case on it with the battery docked so ?? ? ? ? ??

well i attached the wrong image there so now you're aware that they also make a hasselblad (hahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahhaha bullshit) cobranded camera attachment, which SEEMS like a great idea

it interfaces with the built in camera app. cool! it has optical zoom. cool! it has a 12mp sensor. wh- what. what? for $199?

$199 doesn't get you even 24mp? what? why? how? this is absurd

and i mean, like... why are phone manufacturers not in the case game ?? ? i don't get htis?? they could sell them with every single phone, they could sell them after the initial sale, but instead they pretend they don't exist

and since they pretend they don't exist, you have to worry about shit like "can i even GET a case for this", which, with the Z3, you basically can't. Certainly not one that can be installed when any of the mods are installed.

So, since I wasn't willing to buy anything I couldn't touch, I bought a Moto X4. Which isn't what I wanted, and I bought it under duress, and I might return it.

I bought it almost on principle, almost in anger, because it is about 5.2"? something like that? comfortably smaller than my nexus 6p, and it has unique features. i deserve unique features!

It has two cameras, and the second one is ultrawide, like nearly a fisheye, and I can just select it. That's great! It has an LED illuminator on the front-facing camera. That's great! These things matter to me!

it appears to be a Snapdragon 630 which isn't tip-top in the market but all the ones that are are expensive, 6" slabs with notches.

the REALLY disturbing thing is not knowing if it's actually any better than my nexus 6p was, at all. Maybe it's worse, I really can't say. The numbers mean nothing. 810 vs 630? Well that's like an i5 6th gen vs an i7 1st gen, they don't compare.

the nokia 8, which i just learned about, has a snapdragon 835. i see this mentioned in a lot of high end phones (i think) in the same breath as "why didn't they use the 845", but it's not clear - is this better than the 630 in my x4? is it better than the 810 in my nexus 6p?

what's the order of precedence? does it go
630, 810, 835, 845
or does it go
810, 630, 835, 845
or does it go
810, 835, 630, 845

because all of these are possibilities. i learned this in the Radeon Era of the late 2000s; the numbers are a goddamn cipher.

Oh, and of course we get another wrinkle: The Nokia 3, 6, and 7 phones are all available here. The 8 was not released in the US :)

You can buy it, but it's grey market.

The 7 looks okay unnnnntillll you notice it has a :) notch :) and only one camera. RighT? You just can't get all the things in one device. You can get two, or one, but never three.