Category: My Phone History

I didn’t expect to be adding to this series so soon, but with a family holiday coming up where I would like to capture a lot of photos and videos (there are reasons for this I won’t go into) the need for a capable handy camera became more pressing.

The S25 256GB retails for £849 in the UK, which seems like a lot of money but then I suppose it’s probably the cheapest phone for sale with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. For whatever reason these are selling new, sealed in the box on eBay for around £510 for the 128GB version. I was able to get mine which is the 256GB version, unused with the seal broken for £540. With over £300 off the retail price this pricing is only £40 more than the upcoming Samsung A56 which seems like an excellent deal.

This phone ticks a lot of boxes for me:

• It is a compact device by 2025 standards.
• It has a set of very capable cameras for photo and video.
• It has the Snapdragon 8 Elite which is the most powerful chipset currently available.
• It’s very power efficient giving great battery life and excellent standby time even though the battery is only 4000mAh.
• Samsung are offering 7 years of updates with this phone so I can keep it for a long time.

To help the last point I’ve opted for a case and screen protector this time around. I don’t fancy paying for an OLED screen replacement any time soon!

The strange thing is that other than the cameras which were the driving force behind the purchase, the S25 serves to highlight just how good a deal the HMD Pulse is. Yes the screen, haptics, build quality and speakers are better on the S25, but at it’s core the HMD can do the majority of what the S25 can, at least in my use case: I don’t use AI, I have no need for it and would rather not trade additional privacy to have it. I don’t do any mobile gaming on my phone, I have devices better suited to gaming. None of my tasks are particularly intensive either.

One thing I have missed and I’m glad to have back is OneUI. Regardless of my opinion on Samsung’s practices, their greed and other issues they really have nailed their operating system. It manages to be more feature rich and customizable than any other Android skin, while still being a very well organised, intuitive experience. I may only feel this way because it’s the mobile OS I’ve spent the most time with.

While I don’t regret this purchase at all, because it was a good deal and I needed it, I do still need to get my impulse buying under control. I didn’t spend much time thinking about this purchase and when I came across the deal I bought it immediately. Following some tips online I’ve implemented a purchasing delay, something I’ll write about separately but I think it’s something that could help a lot of us be more intentional with how we spend our money.

This is perhaps the most basic device relative to the year purchased, and it is a stark contrast to the Oppo Find x8 Pro that came before it.

It has been a tool to reset my expectations and a realization of my actual requirements.

It turns out I don’t need a £2000 flagship, what a surprise! What I need from a phone is fairly simple:

• A device that is comfortable to hold and pocketable.
• NFC for contactless payments
• Android operating system for flexibility, RCS chats and Quick share.
• A reasonable camera for photo taking when I don’t have my DSLR handy.
• Quality video camera, the DSLR is unable to take video.
• Long battery life. I am at the point now where I don’t even want to see the battery percentage. It just needs to last the full day and go on charge overnight.

This phone manages all but the last 2 points. The camera is not up to the task. However in every other area it performs admirably. It’s never slow to the point of being annoying, it’s very stable in that apps do not crash and it doesn’t need rebooting, the screen is decent and it’s never not lasted a full day on a single charge.

For the £60 I paid for it this phone is hard to fault. I have written a full review of the phone here, but this post isn’t a review it’s more how the phone has fit into my life. Will it be my daily driver for the long term? Probably not. With a young son I regularly want to capture quick photos and videos and this phone really isn’t up to that. In anything less than optimal lighting this produces very noisy and blurry results.

The way I’m choosing to think about this is in 10 years time will I be happy with the 2025 version of me choosing to use this phone, and take pretty poor photos/videos? I’m going to guess I won’t. I am fortunate enough to have disposable income, and making a conscious choice now to make a purchase for a long term handy camera that’s always in my pocket might be a good call.

The Samsung A55 was what I purchased after the S24. I actually don’t have much if anything bad to say about this one. Even it’s Exynos chipset didn’t cause me any issues (shock!).

It’s the Flagship of Samsung’s A series devices. Compared to the rest of the A series I’d say it’s more of a budget S series device. After all it has an Aluminium and glass body, a big OLED panel, 8GB of RAM and a main camera with OIS. It even has a Micro SD slot, something that the S series don’t.

It has some cuts though from the flagship range, as would be expected. There’s no wireless charging. The bezels are bigger. It has a shorter update promise (still 4 years of OS upgrades). Other than that there’s not much downgrade.

For the average person this would probably be the Samsung to get. They’ll still feel like they’re getting a premium device, but with a much smaller price tag. Being honest, even to me this device felt premium.

At launch this phone was arguably a tough sell with it’s pricing. The 128GB model was £439 and the 256GB was £489 (I can’t imagine they sold many 256GB models with expandable storage!). Quite quickly though this phone started popping up for much lower prices where it became almost irresistible. I picked mine up for just £225 new, unboxed.

For once with Samsung using Exynos chipsets this device performed well, and the battery life was good. I’m not sure what they had done differently with this one but I’m assuming it was a fluke as they made a complete disaster with the Exynos 2400 in the S24. The camera was very good too, it could produce decent photos and videos even in low light. This is a phone I do regret selling on, and I can’t even remember the reasons I did so at this point.

On the plus side I sold the device for the exact same value I’d purchased it for, so nothing was lost! This seems to echo a lot in these turbulent few years of excessive phone ownership. Thankfully I’ve never lost a considerable amount of money. Because I was always careful with my devices, and generally never purchased them brand new (if buying outright) they always sold for either the same or only slightly less than I’d purchased them for. Looking back over the last 4 years I’d guess I’ve only lost a couple of hundred on reselling these devices in total, something that most people would blow on a couple of nights out on the drink! (If you hadn’t guessed I don’t drink, I don’t like the unpredictability of drunk people and don’t like the after effects the next day)

These were two devices I owned one after the other, The S24 Ultra first followed by the S24 base model. Both times these were bought as part of a SIM contract, and both times when I had to go through the returns process I had an absolute nightmare.

The S24 Ultra was the most uncomfortable phone I’ve ever held. It’s tablet sized and has really sharp corners. This was a 2 handed phone every time, and it had some serious weight too. The camera was a noticeable downgrade from the S23 Ultra’s which disappointed me. Coupled with strangely poor battery life it and went back within my 14 day returns window. The network completely messed up my cancellation and left me without my number that I’d ported in. It took me over a month to get this back.

After the dust had settled I saw a really good Black Friday deal on the base model S24, with the same network. I placed the order. Initially it got cancelled because I’d previously had issues with the S24 Ultra. I wish I’d let them cancel the order completely as this one was even more disappointing. The company initially shipped it to the wrong address. I then had to drive 20 miles to the nearest Curry’s store, and wait an hour there to take delivery. The phone was a much more manageable size, but having a smaller battery coupled with the Exynos chipset was just a recipe for disaster. For the 3 days I used this phone I had to charge it 2 or 3 times a day. It was a permanently hot, stuttering mess. Again I returned it in the 14 day window and went through exactly the same problems with trying to reclaim my phone number. After about another month of back and forth, and them sending me cheques and credits as apologies I finally had my number back and I was free to go.

There are two things I learnt from these experiences. Never buy a phone with an Exynos chipset, and never buy a phone through iD mobile.

Very much in keeping with the weird and wonderful theme I’d started with the AGM M7, the Unihertz Jelly Star was my next phone.

The idea behind this one being it’s a fully fledged Android smartphone in a miniscule package. The display is 3 inches diagonally and it weighs just 116 grams. You can do everything you would ever do on any other smartphone you just don’t have much screen to play with.

Day to day usage of this phone wasn’t bad. The battery lasted fine. I could do what I needed to, even have things like banking apps and contactless payments.

The problems came whenever I had to use the keyboard. I have quite large hands, and wide thumbs so trying to poke a letter on the keyboard was more a game of luck and chance than it was one of accuracy. Swipe to text worked to a degree, but I still struggled as I couldn’t see where the swipe pattern actually was on the phone.

While this phone serves some people very well, and actually seems to be the answer for people lowering their screen time without making too many sacrifices for me it was just a fun gimmick. It was fun to show people who were generally amazed a phone could be that small, the illuminated rear was novel (but still a shameless Nothing rip off) and it really was full featured.

In the end though it didn’t really matter. I was unable to use the phone. Thankfully this marked the last device in my peculiar device spree.

This is one of the more bizarre mobile phones I’ve owned. It’s made by a company who specialize in rugged phones and is really designed for people in lines of work where having to use a touch screen wouldn’t be ideal.

However this phone is more than what it first appears. It does have a touch screen, a capacitive glass screen in fact. It also has probably the loudest speaker I’ve ever heard of a phone and a very bright flashlight. It’s unsung party trick though, is that it runs Android.

This means that while it doesn’t have the play store or any Google services inbuilt you can install Android applications on it in the form of .APK files. In theory as long as the app doesn’t have any requirements like safetynet and GMS then you can run it (banking etc is unlikely to work).

It’s not an easy device to work with, partly due to it being a form factor that android was never designed to work with, and partly because this is not a normal implementation of Android. However with a bit of technological knowhow it is possible to make yourself a smartphone/dumbphone hybrid.

I spent a lot more time tinkering with this device than I actually spent using it. Once developer mode was on and USB debugging was enabled I could do a lot with this device. I spent quite a long time configuring the T9 keyboard as by default it doesn’t have predictive text. Eventually I had something that was a semi smartphone with enough friction in it’s use that you wouldn’t want to spend too long on it.

In the end this device was a bit too “out there” even for me. For one it’s big. It takes up a lot more room in your pocket than an average smartphone, it’s heavy too. Mainly though I was actually embarrassed to pull this out in public. It draws attention and generally not the good kind. I prefer to be a bit more subtle. This was resold online where it went to a farmer, where I’m sure it will have it’s ruggedness put to the test daily!

As I said in my previous post there were still hiccups along the way to get to where I am now. The iPhone 15 Pro was one of them. I fell right into the marketing trap with this one. The natural titanium frame, the new action button and the sleek design lured me in.

The phone was a very premium device. The magsafe range of accessories are great and at the time I used this with a car dash mount and a wireless charger. The device was seamlessly fast, had a great camera array and was very efficient on power.

Getting the phone (thankfully used) actually lured me right back in to the Apple ecosystem. Over the course of my ownership I ended up with an M1 Macbook Pro, an iPad, a watch and Airpod Pro 2nd gen earphones.

The strange thing was that this time rather than feeling like I’d spent too much, it was the ecosystem that drove me to get rid of this phone. The iPhone was the centre of the ecosystem, and in being that it basically became unused. At home I’d use the iPad, at work I’d use the Macbook and when I was out I’d generally leave the phone at home and use the Apple watch and Airpods over cellular. With an ecosystem so comprehensive the iPhone in the equation basically just becomes a hub to relay calls and iMessage to the other devices.

This phone was resold, for basically the same money I purchased it for and for a while I used a more basic iPhone (can’t remember exactly which model) as the “hub” for the ecosystem. However cracks were showing, there are programs I rely on that need a Windows operating system and I was having to use a VM on the Macbook more often than I was using MacOS. In the Apple world one a part of the ecosystem goes the rest crumbles around it. In the end I got out, sold all of the Apple products and decided I’d not be going back to it again.

Around this time I’d been struggling with screen time, and wanted to be more present. I decided to go down the route of a “dumbphone”, something I’d tried on and off for a while. Using it more as a tool for a digital detox, or a system reset to break habits seems to be the best option but I hadn’t worked this out at this point. So next I got an AGM M7, was this the answer to my problems? No, but it was certainly an experience!

Coming from the S23 Ultra this was a big downgrade on paper. However with the Samsung credits accumulated from the S23 Ultra purchase I was able to purchase this device entirely with no money leaving my hands.

At the time we were providing these devices as entry level business devices, so I knew them well. They have their limitations but for the price point they excel as a full package. For starters the 4G variant utilises a Mediatek Helio G80 chipset, rather than an Exynos option (Avoid the 5g model for this reason!), so whilst performance isn’t ground-breaking the efficiency is. With light usage this phone can make it through a week on a single charge. The phone is also a great all rounder. It has 2 SIM slots, a Micro SD slot and a 3.5mm audio jack (something the majority of the more expensive phones on the market can’t match!). It has NFC and a surprisingly high quality LCD display (Excellent colours and 400PPI!).

This phone was the one that reset my expectations and got me questioning everything I’d come to believe about Smartphones. Back in 2012 the user experience was very different between a budget phone and a flagship, you needed a flagship just to have a fully functional device. If a phone with the functionality of a 2012 budget phone today I genuinely think people would return them as faulty, they were that bad. You can read my full thoughts on this here. Don’t get me wrong, I still think there is a substantial gap in performance and quality between the upper and lower ends of the market but our usage requirements of phones haven’t scaled at the same rate performance has. Everything we need is available in most of the budget phones on the market. The only difference being instead of using maybe 5-10% of the power of a flagship we would use 75-100% of a budget phone, but at the end of the day the task is still accomplished.

There were many more mistakes I made with impulsive purchases after this one, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and impulse buying driving most of them, but this phone put the thought in my head that lead me to where I currently stand today.

The one thing that would really make this phone a complete package would be Optical Image Stabilization on the main lens, but that’s nit-picking and would most likely drive the price up too high.

I kept the A14 around for a long time, when it wasn’t my main phone it was a secondary device. Through the time of finding balance with my screen time this was the backup phone I would keep apps on while I used a “Dumbphone”. Some of these devices are still in daily use at my work today, and they’re still working fantastically. They are durable, easy to repair and are proving themselves to have longevity on their side too. I do believe a lot of manufacturers put out more consistent offerings in their budget line-up’s than their premium ranges. Generally they use a proven chipset, with technology a generation or two old, so there’s less to go wrong that hasn’t already been solved. We also don’t have as high expectations when we’ve spend a 10th of the money!

I’ve chosen to bunch these 3 Pixel phones together into one post because in general the experience was the same and the reason I didn’t keep them was also the same.

I owned the Pixel 6a between the iPhone 13 and the Samsung S23 Ultra. The 7a between the S23 Ultra and the Samsung A14 and the Pixel 8 between the Unihertz Jelly Star and the Samsung S24 Ultra.

Each time I’ve bought into the idea of the Pixel more than the device itself. They are supposed to be a “pure” Android experience, they never really have flagship specs but the software is supposed to make up for that. They are usually cheaper than other devices from big brands. They offer long software support and have readily available spare parts and repair guides.

All of that on paper sounds like the dream phone, couple that with an easily unlockable bootloader and a wealth of custom ROM availability and this should really be the perfect device for me every single time. But there is one thing that these devices have in common that lets them all down.

Tensor Chipsets.

I absolutely detest Samsung’s Exynos chipsets, they are inferior in everyway compared to their Qualcomm and TSMC counterparts. They get hot, have awful modems and drain the battery like nothing else I’ve ever used. Why am I talking about Exynos chipsets when Google use Tensor? As it turns out a Tensor chipset is an Exynos in disguise. It is made in the same foundry, by Samsung and only has a few tweaks made to it to differentiate it from an Exynos chipset. With that it shares all the same downfalls.

Google Pixels get hot, they have poor reception, they drain their batteries (particularly on mobile data) and have lackluster performance when compared to their counterparts. You will always get the Exynos and Tensor sympathisers, that will try to tell you it’s not a big deal, they’re not that bad and in some case they’re better than the alternatives. I will tell you categorically that this isn’t true. They are awful.

Every time I’ve fallen for it, only to realise shortly after purchase. Yes the camera is great, yes the devices are really well designed, yes the software experience is great but fundamentally these hardware issues are always there and always causing problems.

There are rumours circulating on the internet that Google will be moving away from Samsung’s foundry over to TSMC’s for their Pixel 10 series. If this bears any truth this will be the first generation of Pixel devices I could really recommend. Until then unfortunately my advice has to be to steer well clear of any Pixel with a tensor chipset. The last Pixel device that had a Qualcomm chipset was the Pixel 5, which was one generation previous to the nice hardware redesign. You could still purchase that device today and use it without issue, community support takes even the original Pixel (sailfish) up to Android 15 so I doubt that will become an issue any time soon.