I've owned a total of 3 smartphones in my life. The very first one I got was an Alcatel Evolve. I got that in 2017 I want to say. It was a budget phone, just enough to get the job done and had it for roughly 5 years. I ended up smashing it in 2021 because by that point, it's performance has slowed to a crawl and it's battery life was poor to the point where it could not be used anymore for daily use.

To replace it I got a Samsung Galaxy A02s, another budget-line phone and it is still around me today. Not quite as good as it was the first year I had it for and it's only purpose is to give me entertainment during breaks and meal times at work.

Alongside it, my current and best phone that's my primary is the Samsung Galaxy A32-5G. Because of how much I spent on it, I gave that phone an Otterbox protection and it has done wonders since there were times because of my stupid coat pockets, it'd fall about a couple feet from the pocket to the concrete flooring at work. It is used for everything, almost.

Cheap android phone with custom rom support.

I absolutely love my Xperia 1 VI. I didn't realize how much I missed the headphone port until I had it back. Also there's so many fun camera settings to play around with. And the expandable storage that I loaded up with ROMs

Between an Android or an Iphone smartphone.

Anything with Android on it for sure.

When you look at smartphone manufacturers, the only reason you should consider a specific manufacturer besides price (i'm talking function wise) is for any prebuilt settings. Some might have some special kind of battery saving feature among others including opening Android more compared to others. Some phones might have build in local radio support or Bluetooth others likely don't.

Currently on a CMF phone 1.

Best phone is a tie between Nokia E70 or the HTC Dream. Suitable form factors and physical keyboards <3

Current: S24U, Moto Razor 2023+, Pixel 8 Pro.

Best phone: Probably the LG V20 or V30. Can't remember which.

Lenovo ThinkPhone. I like it. Very tough, fast, and good battery life.

Currently g42 hawao with calyxos, best past one was nexus 6

Pixel fold

V60

Best phone ever made, headphone jack, beautiful sound, perfect screen, had the extra screen if you wanted, did everything, microsd, no bullshit software, still had docked mode.

Had the z fold 3, was OK, but it was really way too skinny to use folded, and unfolding it all the time was a pain, the pixel fold really nailed the form factor.

Shame google makes garbage software, Samsung put infinite bloatware, but they also had docked mode and charge limit, which this crap doesnt. OTOH at least I can read and use it folded.

Currently using a Galaxy S21 FE. I'm honestly not rhat picky, as long as it's not apple, and as long as it's fast enough, as my employers have paid for them. I got this one after being on the wrong side of the country while my phone died, so I had the shop clerk phone up the guy at the head office to confirm that I could just pick one and send them the bill. The S21FE was what was in store at the time, and I was kind of in a hurry, as I was in the middle of a projectrelated field work.

I've mostly stuck to Samsung because that's the (mangled) version of Android that I'm used to. It takes some tampering with adb to remove the bloat, but once done it works really well.

The "best" phone (quotes, because I think that's highly subjective) I ever had was the Galaxy Note 2. I loved that phone. Great stylus, good OCR, and once it got used to my terrible handwriting, it was much better and less prone to error than typing on the softkeys. The Note 3 through 6 were not available in my country, so I know nothing. And it annoyed the fuck out of me that Note 7 was a safety hazard, because beyond that it seemed like a really good phone. Sadly the later iterations of the Note series seem too cheaply made. Plastic stylus, etc.

Honorable mention: Openmoko GTK 2. I loved it, but the concept of a linux smartphone (or smartphones in general) hadn't matured completely in 2007, so it wasn't at the stage where it could replace my dumb phone completely.

Today, as mentioned, I'm not that picky. I feel like most phones are the same, except the ones that are too cheap. There is only so much useful hardware that can be crammed into a phone, and beyond that there are mostly improvements on things such as the camera. The rest comes down to software.

You can rip my blackberry key2 from my death cold hands.

S8+ I thought was the best one that I had till I upgraded

Considering the state of the phones back then my 1+ 3t was amazing. No bloat, dirt cheap. A real flagship killer, as they positioned it.

These days I only require a phone to have fast charge like OnePlus or Oppo delivers it. 15 minutes charge for a full day of use. That's awesome. I can never go back to iOS because I'm so used to my custom keyboard and the gestures I use for quick acces to apps and other stuff.

I liked my Motorola One Vision, 21:9 source ratio was a banger, lots of screen real estate and the phone fit in the hand nicely, vanilla Android was cool, I hate the iPhoney flavor of Android my current OnePlus has, only downsides was:

• Exynos chip resulting in poorly optimized software, battery life was shit
• LCD screen, OLED would be nicer
• Poor cameras, even 2x zoom looked mushy AF
• Motorola's poor software support, it got Android 10 a year after it came out, we were told it'll get fast software updates because of the Android One programme
• The fingerprint sensor on the back was the shittiest one I've ever used, barely worked, face unlock was a godsend... until COVID came
• Motorola's thought with this one the middle of the phone is the best place for the NFC antenna, I had to do some weird ninja moves with the phone for the touchless payments to work

Currently using a Moto G Stylus 2020, this thing has never had major updates pushed, and the last security one was a while ago, it's pretty decent but has gotten much slower over time and is probably near the end of its life.

The best phone I had was an iphone 7, it was originally terrible, but the it was iOS 12? (13?) that came out and it was so much better. Like you would have major performance issues with this thing before the update, Apple was probably at their peak around then. I stopped using it because it was vendor locked to Sprint, and sprint stopped existing in my area when T Mobile bought them out

Using a mid budget Redmi Note 10 pro, nothing exceptional, it works pretty good with a nice screen. My favorite was the Nexus 5.

Currently have Pixel 9 Fold, it's ok

Best is probably HTC G2. Still waiting for HTC to make a G3

CAT S22 Flip as my daily driver. I also don't really use my phone for content consumption anymore; I just need the basics + hotspot.

"Best phone" doesn't really exist for me in the smarphone era because they've all been compromises. If my OnePlus 3 had a slide out QWERTY keyboard, it would probably qualify, though.

Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G