Category: My Phone History

At this point in 2022 I was firmly stuck down the rabbit hole of privacy, “de-googling” and security. The problem was I was taking it all very seriously without having a threat model. What was I striving to protect and what was it that I needed to keep private? Obsessing over these things without this information defined is destructive and dangerous to wellbeing. Thankfully I’ve figured this out now, and while I’m well aware of what happens to our information when we hand it over to these companies I’m at peace with it, security and convenience are more factors that I value at this point in life.

Regardless this was the point I was at. GrapheneOS wasn’t for me, for various reasons and I didn’t want to be handing my data over to Google. So I opted for an iPhone 13. I purchased it very lightly used for a big saving over the RRP. iPhone’s always have very nice build quality and this was no exception. One thing I immediately noticed too was that there was so much more 3rd party accessories of a much higher quality available than I was used to. The screen protectors were a perfect fit, the cases were high quality and fit with such precision it was hard to get them off. This is something I’d never appreciated before and I suppose is a natural effect of a smaller device range with such a large user base.

I did my usual of going all or nothing when I got this phone. I ended up with an M1 Macbook Air, Airpod Pro’s and an Apple watch. In hindsight this was way too big of a change to be making all at once, and there was no real reason for it. I was excited to experience the Apple ecosystem but in the end it was also the reason I got back out.

After a short period of use I felt like I’d become trapped in it. My custom domain email was routing through iCloud, all my photos were saved to it, my passwords were all synced to their password app making it near impossible to access anything on a non-apple product. For some I imagine this level of compatibility (for example the Airpod’s would just automatically connect to whichever Apple device I was using) would be a joy, but to me it felt like walls were being built around me preventing me from using anything else. I was also having major buyers remorse at the sheer amount of money I’d spent on all of these products (recurring theme?) and the fact that in just a few short years all of these devices would be near worthless.

As usual I resold all the devices, and actually lost very little money if any at all as the iPhone and Macbook had already been purchased used to hadn’t really depreciated any more. Another benefit of Apple products is their slow depreciation. If you buy a device that’s a month old or even a year old you can own it for a period of time and generally resell it for the same money or a very slightly lower amount. This isn’t really echoed in the Windows/Android device economy where device prices fall off a cliff very quickly.

As a stop gap device while I decided what I wanted to do I picked up a cheap Nokia G11. This phone won’t get it’s own post because it wasn’t a device I owned for long. It was very basic but fully functional. HMD generally use Unisoc chipsets in their budget devices, which is fine and allows them to price their devices very low but they’re notoriously difficult to unlock the bootloader on. In that current period of paranoia this was unacceptable to me. I did keep the device around as a backup device for a while, but I think it ended up getting broken in a drawer.

The Samsung M51 was a bit of an unexpected release in the UK. Normally we don’t get access to the M series, it’s usually restricted to India and other eastern regions. For some reason this one was officially sold through Samsung UK and I went for it.

Following my new love of big batteries at the time this one had the biggest yet and has still been unmatched since: 7000mAh. It was a battery titan, paired with a Snapdragon 730G it had a 2 to 3 day battery life no matter how you used it.

I was actually very fond of this, a Samsung without an Exynos chipset is already on to being a winner in my books and paired with a massive battery like this it was a recipe for success. With a high resolution AMOLED panel and 6GB RAM as well it was not simply a budget phone with a big battery, it had specs to match. It’s only downside was weight, but that’s unavoidable with a cell that’s physically bigger than almost every other phone. It weighed 213g. For reference, a little iPhone SE 2020 weighs just 148g. This thing was hefty.

I owned this phone for around a year taking me into 2021, around this time I was getting paranoid about tracking and developing an interest in privacy focused software, all while trying to battle an ever spiralling screen time problem. I discovered GrapheneOS and with that this phone went and I replaced it with a Pixel 3a.

I won’t write a whole segment about the Pixel 3a because it turned out GrapheneOS wasn’t for me. In my eyes it’s still the highest quality, secure smartphone operating system out there but it comes at a cost of having to make some sacrifices. I’ll probably write another post at some point about different mobile operating systems so I’ll save the full details for then but essentially privacy and ultimate security do come at a cost of convenience.

For the first decade of my driving I was like a kid in a sweet shop, I wanted so many different cars but could only have one at a time. My average ownership was about 6 months before I’d swap it for something else. It took a good few years before I even had to experience the yearly MOT inspection because I never owned a car long enough. I would generally flip between polar opposites of cars. I’d get something huge with a big engine, and then get sick of struggling to find a parking space big enough or the excessive fuel consumption. I’d then get something absolutely tiny with a engine that would be better suited to a motorcycle to resolve the issue, only to hate the lack of power and space. What I’d not learnt yet was that sometimes a compromise in the middle is the best option.

This phone was a purchase similar to the manner of how I’d buy cars. I’d suffered with powerful phones with tiny batteries and gone completely the opposite way. A underpowered phone with a huge battery.

This Motorola G8 was a decidedly basic phone with basic specifications apart from one thing, a 5000mAh battery. This was one of the biggest on the market at the time, with the average only being 3000mAh in 2020.

Being able to use the phone without having to worry about the battery percentage at all was refreshing and I didn’t want to go back. However everything else about it was lacking in comparison to the phones I was coming from with flagship level chipsets. At the time this was a big deal to me so I resold it after a fairly short time.

I remember it having a strange stutter, which drove me mad. Scrolling would have micro stutters, even watching high resolution videos did it. Which is strange because I’ve used much lower powered devices since this one and never experienced this again. There’s not an awful lot else I remember about this phone, it was in those murky Covid times where we were all sat about extremely bored and days merged into years.

As the English saying goes: Out of the frying pan and into the fire, meaning escaping one bad thing to succumb to something worse.

Another phrase more commonly used by Americans is: There’s no replacement for displacement, meaning the best car is always the one with the larger engine.

Both of these relate to my experience with this phone. The first due to having issues with a 2800mAh battery and trying to resolve the issue with a phone that has a 1821mAh battery. The second only applies loosely, as if we were comparing phones to cars the battery would probably be the fuel tank, but for the sake of this phrase it’s the engine. With all the optimisations in the world, and the most energy efficient components a bigger batter is always going to perform better than a smaller one.

Battery life is and always will be a function of a phone that I prefer to be as good as possible. I’ve got rid of multiple phones that didn’t hold what I would determine a satisfactory charge, and purchased phones solely because they advertised massive battery life. This and the previous phone was the point where I realised how much I valued this. In 2020 we were at home a lot, so I was never far from a charger but even so I use a mobile phone so it can be mobile. If I wanted a device that was permanently tethered I’d use a landline and a computer!

The strange thing about this phone was that technically it was very efficient. Left on standby overnight this phone would only lose 1-2% battery, and through mild usage it lasted very well. The problem was when you started ramping up the CPI usage. This phone had the flagship chipset the Apple A13 Bionic from the iPhone 11. It could decimate it’s tiny battery in around an hour if you were really pushing it. Apple device have always been very good at idling without using much power at all I will give them that.

At the time of owning this phone I had what I’d call a beater car. It cost me £500 and was a Citroen C4 1.6 Turbo Diesel, the one where the centre of the steering wheel stayed still while the outer rim turned. It ran OK but the radiator fan didn’t work. In the UK this was never really much of a problem, until it was. It was an extremely hot day and I was stuck in traffic as there’d been an accident somewhere down the road. Traffic was moving a car length every minute or so but just enough that I couldn’t switch off the engine. The temperature gauge started rising until it was in the red. Desperate I put all the windows down and turned the heater and fan on full. I was sweating but the coolant temperature came down, I was using my heater core as a makeshift radiator. What I didn’t think of was that my little iPhone SE was on a vent mount in direct fire of the main heater. I only realised when the phone, which was also being used for GPS did a thermal shutdown. I took it off and almost burnt my fingers it was that hot. When it eventually cooled down and powered back up I’d lost 10% battery health! It was quickly resold after that.

This was the beginning of my descent into mobile phone buying madness. This phone was bought on a contract that heavily subsidised the cost of the device (I later found out why, hint; battery life) and worked out cheaper than a SIM only contract. It seemed a no brainer at a time when I was ready to have my own personal handset again.

Initially I thought the Pixel 4 was great. The pictures this camera produced were the best I’d ever seen from a smartphone, it also had some quirky experimental features under project “Soli” which gave the phone a little front facing radar scanner. this allowed for very secure face unlocking and meant the phone could detect hand movements and gestures in a bubble area around it. In theory this meant you could swipe the air to change track, it knew when your hand was approaching it to pick it up and other things. Ultimately it turned out to be a gimmick and the entire project was scrapped when the Pixel 5 released.

My one issue with this phone that made it an absolute deal breaker was battery life. This phone had a powerhouse chipset (Snapdragon 855) and a measly 2800mAh battery. In my ownership I never once made it through a full day without needing to charge. On full days away from a power source I could end up without a phone by 2PM. Google promised the battery would be big enough because their software optimisations would make up for it, they didn’t. They then promised it would be fixed in the next software update, it wasn’t. I lost patience with this, resold the device and paid the contract off. It turns out I was right to jump ship, the battery life issues were never resolved and this device went down as one of Google’s failures.

The 4XL did slightly better, because of it’s bigger size it packed a larger battery which masked the issues the device had. People still hold that version in fairly high regard today.

I wonder if blunders like this are why we see little to no innovation from manufacturers today? Fear of failure and losing a generation to their rivals. It only takes having a brief look at the notorious Samsung Note 7 to see what can go wrong in extreme cases.

The Note 9 was the last of my “greats”. I actually think this phone was part of the issue I began switching phones so frequently after this one, I was chasing the experience of it. That and the absolute boredom of the Covid-19 authoritarian times.

This phone was released in the third quarter of 2018, however I think I only got this early 2019. My boss, who by this time I’d developed a decent relationship said pick the best phone for you (me) that helps you do your job to the best of your ability. I pored through the corporate price list and came across this Note 9. The S-pen caught my attention as it would make precise clicks in tiny remote sessions a lot easier. So I settled on it.

Immediately I could tell this device was worlds above anything I’d owned before. The screen stood out, with such a high resolution and colour depth. Samsung really did throw everything they had at this thing. It had an iris scanner, standard face recognition and a rear fingerprint reader just for biometrics. It had Dex mode which was fantastic for me often travelling. It even had a heart rate monitor and blood oxygen sensor next to the camera. It had different levels of touch force recognition and haptics that just made the whole user experience a joy.

If in the UK we’d had the Snapdragon chipset this really would have been a 100/100 device. However after about a year and a half of usage, problems started to arise. The phone started to get very hot in normal usage, and battery drain became more prominent. The phone actually got so hot on regular occasions that the adhesive on the rear glass degraded and it became loose. The battery began to swell and cracked the glass.

By this point, the boss I had that enforced the one phone policy had left and I wasn’t overly impressed with the new leadership. I decided it was time to get my own number again, and split my work and personal life properly as it should’ve always been. The Note 9 got a fresh battery and back glass and was resigned to just work phone duties for around another year before it was replaced with a Note 10 plus. As that was a dedicated work device I won’t give it a dedicated review, but in short it was underwhelming. However it didn’t have the same issues the Note 9 did, but the Note 9 was the last of Samsung throwing everything they had at their flagships and they started stripping back features.

After 2 years of imposed limits from the iPhones I was sick of it. Using my phone as both work and personal, with all the requirements of being in IT it was starting to hold me back. My remote access software didn’t have an iOS version, I needed a terminal program to access linux servers over SSH and I was also just missing the freedom of Android. I bought this device myself and put the iPhone 6s in a drawer, but when my boss found out he paid me back for the device to keep it as a company device.

Xiaomi have always been absolutely chaotic in the amount of devices they release and their terrible naming conventions. It’s almost impossible to gauge when a device was released and where it stands in their line up by name, and this was no exception. I still don’t really know where this device stood, however it was quite cheap at £150 brand new.

I remember the phone shipped with a Chinese ROM, and to flash the global ROM you had to unlock the bootloader. This was a laborious process and it involved signing up to their online account, performing certain actions (can’t remember what they were) and then putting a request in for an unlock code. It took a few days either way. However when done I had the correct ROM flashed and once again had my rooted Android experience I’d been missing.

MIUI was a bizarre skin of Android though, it felt like a knock off iOS in that it had no app drawer with everything being on home pages. They’d also heavily changed all aspects of the operating system such as the status bar, quick settings and normal settings menus. All in all it wasn’t a bad experience, it took quite a bit of extra effort to get the phone to a place where I was happy with it but it was something I was willing to accept considering how cheap it was for the hardware specs offered.

This phone met it’s demise on my Birthday. I was on holiday and sat out having drinks by the pool one evening. A few people I’d got friendly with there knew it was my birthday and had decided to buy me lots of drinks. Inebriated I stumbled out of my chair and my phone took a tumble out of my pocket. It hit the tiled floor, smashed the screen and fell straight into the pool. The phone actually survived, but the screen didn’t. I ordered a replacement screen but with Xiaomi being so fragmented with multiple revisions of the same model I unsurprisingly ended up with the wrong screen. At this point I decided it wasn’t worth chancing another incorrect screen and retired the phone.

This phone was Apple’s answer to “bendgate”. It was slightly thicker, and had better performance than the iPhone 6. Looking back at these release schedules this is probably the release cycle Apple should revert to. We’re at the point now where year on year there are very little changes to devices, having an “S” variant still allows the company to release a new model to please their shareholders but also makes it clear that this is still a very similar device to the previous one. However I think moving away from this was almost certainly intentional, people want to feel like they have the latest and greatest model of phone and if just 1 year later a new product is released with a new model number they’ll be that bit more tempted to buy it!

I don’t really have much to say about the iPhone 6s, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There was nothing wrong with it, and it did nothing special. It wasn’t a memorable phone in any way, but it served it’s purpose perfectly fine.

I do miss the days when fingerprint scanners were placed centrally on phones though, at the front at the bottom or on the rear near the cameras, I’m not fussy but as a left handed person having it integrated into the power button on the right hand side is just not practical for me. Obviously a lot of phones today have them integrated into the screen but I don’t find these as accurate or fast as the physical sensor, and they generally never play nicely with a screen protector.

The iPhone 6 wasn’t my first experience with iPhones. I’d previously been provided with an iPhone 5s at a previous job, but it had been a separate work device so I’d never really got to know it and I didn’t consider it a device I owned. When my job gave me this iPhone 6 I was pressured into consolidating down into one device, and giving up my personal phone number in favour of just having the one. Still being fairly fresh faced I agreed to it (I’ve since split back to having two devices and two numbers, and I’d never have just one device again, having some separation between work and play is very important). Nevertheless this agreement allowed me to own some phones that I probably wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

At the time everyone in the company I worked for used iPhones, so it made sense that I had one too so that I fully understood them and was better able to support my colleagues. Even back in 2016 when Android and iOS still had some notable differences the learning curve was minimal. The only difference I really noticed was that the control that I’d been used to with a rooted android device had been taken away from me and placed back firmly in the hands of Apple. It immediately felt like I didn’t really own the device. Nowadays this has intensified, with Apple intensifying their level of control over your device and Google trying to follow Apple’s trend by taking some of the control away from their Pixel users.

If you hadn’t already guessed I’m a firm advocator for open source software, the right to repair and keeping tech out of landfills by keeping it going for as long as possible and finding new uses for things. This operating system did not sit well with me. I tolerated it because I was given unlimited data and I had no phone bill but I didn’t enjoy it.

The phone itself was fine, battery life was better than the aging HTC One M8 I was coming from and the camera was good too. I couldn’t help but notice just how dull the phone was, it felt corporate.

The iPhone 6 didn’t last long in my possession though. After a night of drinking with friends I got into bed, I sent one last message, squinting through one eye and threw the phone onto my soft chair. Or so I thought I had. When I woke up in the morning it turned out I’d completely missed the chair and thrown the phone at the wall. It didn’t take me long to notice that the phone was now banana shaped. I’d become a victim of the notorious “Bendgate”.

I un-bent the device as best I could and gave it to a new starter, the still slightly bent frame hidden by a protective case. I then took the iPhone 6s that had originally been destined for them!

The HTC One M8 was another one of my few near perfect devices I’ve owned. I loved everything about it for the time I owned it.

The design and build was fantastic. The whole frame was a curved metal with the device being really thin and comfortable to hold yet sturdy. The only trade off to this brilliant design was the omission of a removable battery.

It’s camera setup was controversial at the time, as it only had a 4MP main camera with a 4MP depth sensor. HTC claimed their “Ultra Pixel” technology was the next big thing. I’m not sure about that, but the photos the camera produced were fine and being able to adjust the focus after the shot was taken was a nice feature.

When released this phone shipped with Android 4.4.2, and throughout it’s life got upgraded to Android 6. However the community around this phone was massive. It got official LineageOS support which took it all the way up to Android 10.

Once I’d finished my contract on this phone I moved into the period of combining my work phone and my personal phone (wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, however at the time I was practically forced into it) so didn’t pay for a phone for quite a while after this.

This phone continued it’s life for another few years after my ownership. With LineageOS continuing support for this device it was passed on to my Grandfather, who returned it back to me after his usage. By this point the battery was heavily degraded, and repairs weren’t easy on this device. I flashed the latest version of LineageOS and sold it on the used market. If you look now the HTC One M8 sells for very little money, but going back to around 2020 it still fetched around £100 used!

If you wanted a very cheap device, with lots of extra features and custom ROM support the HTC One M8 was a brilliant option at the time, and would still be a fun device for playing around with today.

Unfortunately HTC as we knew it is long gone, however I just had a look for their website and they currently have just 1 new smartphone for sale. I would love to see them make a comeback, our brand choices for smartphones in 2025 is getting more and more limited. Let’s take a moment for the fallen brands; Nokia, Blackberry, LG, Siemens, NEC, BenQ, Palm, Sagem and of course HTC.