I ran geekbench on my pixel 7 with both the stable and beta branch of grapheneos. No difference between the branches. Didnt see any performance numbers like in the article. It scored higher than run to run variance compared to the average geekbench presents though.
and thats why i finally gave up two years ago and bought a pixel and installed grapheneOS. also i just dont use shitty apps anymore. its a good life
The stagnant ram/storage situation weirds me out. Dont get me wrong 6/8GB ram and 128GB rom served, serves and will serve me well. But damn i bought a phone in 2019 for 300€ with the same specs and 6 years later i’m expected to pay almost double the price for the same. Doesnt make any sense to me from a consumer perspective. Yeah the SOC is faster, the cameras a bit better and the screen gets brighter. But there is no reason for me to upgrade unless support ends for my current phone or it just breaks.
The only compelling feature i see in the forseeable future is the whole desktopmode and virtualization thing. If done competently i would pay for that since i dabbled with the idea a lot in the last few years. It just was shit from the software stack standpoint. But then give me 12-16gb of ram and atleast 512gb of storage for lets say 600€ or less.
Oh yeah, this article was about gemini ai. Well i dont give a shit.
i dont get it. that kind of hardware could have been had for the same money 4 years ago. the only upgrade is the max brightness compared to back then. like yeah, i’m also surprised what you get for 200$ because there hasnt been a meaningful price/performance uplift in years.
Motorola G100/Edge S
Atleast here it can be had for under 200€ on the used market.
You need to unlock it via the motorola website. But then its fully rootable. Atleast with the retail unit i purchased.
Buildquality is good. Nothing fancy. Its mostly plastic. But it holds up quite nice after 4 years. The chromed plastic of the frame flaked a bit from my rough handling.
Removable sim and SD-card slot. Battery isnt removable. But its not the worst when it comes to repairability according to teardowns i watched.
But it has a headphone jack!(!!!)
Runs officially up to android 12. Last time i checked it should get android 15 with lineage.
Security… well there is only so much lineage can do with the official vendor support beeing ended like 2 years ago. But its good enough i guess.
That 21:9 1080p 90hz LCD screen is solid. 500 nits brightness isnt state of the art anymore but its more than useable.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 combined with 8gb RAM is still performing well. If your into emulation it handles most of the consoles well. Even switch and pc emulation apart from the most performance hungry titles.
Cooling isnt the best. Its just a heatpipe from the SOC directly too the battery. SOC will heavily throttle as soon as the battery gets to around 40 degrees C. That nets you around 20-30 minutes of the SOC running at full tilt.
USB 3 5gbs with display out is a really cool feature. Sadly with going custom rom you will loose the great ‘ready for’ desktop mode from motorola.
Its a bit big and heavy for my taste though. I switched to a smaller device as my daily driver.
All in all its great device for screwing around imho
Sweet, this was one of the pain points with my pixel. Just felt so much more clunky than it needed to be.