Previously on Lemmy: Motorola
Maybe we should just make this a series now.
Never settle for Oneplus.
I’ve always felt that Oneplus is a brand that I should like on principle of having clean software with barebones but powerful hardware, but in reality, every single Oneplus phone I’ve seen always had some sort of big BUTs attached to them, so buying Oneplus always feels like settling.
Take the Oneplus One for example, that sandstone textured cover was THE most creative material I felt a phone could have had, and I’m honestly shocked nobody has ever done it again. But along with that of course, comes with the cringy “smash your phone” marketing campaign, the half-hearted attempt to distance themselves from their parent company Oppo, the whole software mess with CyanogenMod/OxygenOS, etc.
Had a Oneplus 3T for a while, same deal: Great phone when it works as intended, but they raised their price without making the phone better, and the inexplicable random restarts/battery drain is so irritating, never had another phone that does that.
Recently they’ve dropped all pretense of not being Oppo and abandoned their core audience, choosing to have the “courage” to drop the headphone jack. Mediocre Chinese phones with flagship specs are a dime a dozen, I just don’t see a reason to buy them anymore.
I owned a OnePlus One. Solid phone for the time. Sandstone back and degoogled CyanogenMod.
I got my wife the OnePlus X. Their first attempt at a premium phone. Buggy piece of shit crashed all the time. Google Keep would crash. Chrome would crash. This was reported by everyone, and instead of a fix, it was completely dropped by OnePlus after four months. Like, no updates or anything, because of an outdated chipset. No security patches or anything. Just pretend it never happened, sorry for your money. I sold both phones and went to iPhone.
OnePlus, the supposed best Android phone, sent me to Apple for like a half decade after that. And this was pretty early on in their game, like 2016 or so. I missed out on everything up until now, I have no point of reference on upside down displays and ColorOS vs OxygenOS or whatever. I’ve never been screwed over by trading in a phone to OnePlus and have them come back and take half the value back due to OLED burn-in, because I got away from OnePlus before any of this was even a thing.
Years later, I ended up back on Android and lo and behold, I have a OnePlus phone as a backup. Nord N300 5g or something like that. It came out a few weeks ago but I got it a little earlier than that due to some TikTok thing. It was cheap, it has a good camera, an LCD screen and Android 13. I like the OS better than stock Android (Nokia X20, XR20, Pixel 7 and FairPhone 4 for comparison). I know exactly what I have and I don’t expect much from it, so it is kind of not bad to use. Updates are decent, I’m on a May security patch. The software and overall experience is better than any of the recent Nokia’s I’ve owned (pure trash brand, don’t get me started).
So at the low end, it’s not a bad proposition. Really nothing bad to say about the new phone. It does what I need, has an SD card and 3.5mm jack and an LCD panel. Caveat this: I am not a premium phone user anymore (the last maxed out spec phone I got was a red iPhone 8+ in 2018), so I can’t compare OP11 or OP12 or whatever and won’t get anything with an OLED screen if I don’t have to.