https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-is-the-300-android-phone-to-beat-in-2023-and-it-even-has-a-stylus/
Motorola's Moto G Stylus 5G (2023) sees notable feature improvements that go toe-to-toe with Samsung and Google's mid-rangers. This sale puts it at the top for me.
Oh! My bad. My app doesn't show a preview.
Surprisingly, Jerboa seems to be the only one which showed the preview.
It's just Lenovo with the Motorola name slapped on it, unfortunately. Google stripped all the useful bits and sold it off about a decade ago.
The Nokia XR21 also has a 3.5mm jack. It's likely weaker performance-wise but it has a battery life of approximately 3 days so it won't run out of juice as quickly.
I guess the reviewer doesn’t care about software updates, because Motorola’s support is abysmal.
Oh you mean LineageOS.
I was having a stroke moment thinking this was a ligmaballs joke
Bought one for my kid because he's a little artist. Seems nice. I use a Pixel, but honestly I miss the moto "chop chop to turn on the flashlight" feature from my old Moto.
I miss that flashlight thing too. Also on Pixel now but I used an app called edge gestures to activate my flashlight. I just swipe up on the edge of my screen and hold to activate/deactivate. Not as awesome but very functional. If course I use edge gestures for everything, calling/texting certain contacts, activating apps I use regularly, it's such an awesome tool. Been using for years at this point and can't imagine using my phone without it.
If you go to Settings -> System -> Gestures, there's an option for "Quick tap to start actions", one of the options is to turn on the flashlight when you double tap the back of the phone.
Nice little feature.
That is not an adequate replacement for chop chop.
The screen needs to be on for the pixel gesture to work. Chop chop can be done with the screen off
Tapping the back of the phone to the beat of music will turn on the flashlight by accident all the time. Chop chop is a very deliberate gesture
Tapping does not always register. Sometimes I need to do it 2 or 3 times to get the flashlight to turn on/off, the moto gestures were almost 100% reliable for me
Motorolas are my favorite type of phone. I'm never going to use Apple and Samsung phones are bloated with garbage I don't want. It's not like there's another real option.
The Nothing Phone is the only other real option, but it's also one phone while Motorola has several options for several different price ranges. OnePlus is purely Chinese (I know Motorola isn't perfect but it could be worse). Google Pixels aren't cheap.
Pixels are now super cheap in Europe (in The Netherlands in particular)
Could get a 7 for €400 and now 7a for less than that
Belsimpel, T-Mobile or Tele2 in combination with any carrier plan.
I assume you're not using a Prepaid plan but if you are then my comment was misleading. Everyone I know here has a carrier subscription so I usually list those prices (but with one-time payment for the phone).
Now that the 7A is out, 7 doesn't seem to be getting discounts anymore.
Google Store sometimes has 7A sales for ~€450.
Does the 7 has working Dual SIM support? On the 6 it's broken since release. It's 2 years now and still not fixed. Phone calls randomly drop and after 30 minutes or so the modem just crashes and needs both SIMs to be deactivated and actives again. Absolut shit show.
Good to see they are reaching that price range, but it's probably more "good value/price ratio" than cheap.
What is the difference between OnePlus and Motorola being chinese? It's a serious question, i thought Motorola was fully chinese owned?
OnePlus was fully designed and created in China while Motorola was bought out by Lenovo. Motorola is still fishy but it's technically still an American company so I feel better about it. It's just false hope that my data isn't being stolen, privacy is dead anyways.
Alright :) In my opinion the companies are all not that trustworthy unfortunately. Because Motorola is not that good with updates it's not the brand for me.
OnePlus may be Chinese but the OS has some privacy features like removing permissions for apps you don't use. Out of the Androids I've used, it has way more customisation than I expected.
OnePlus one was the best phone I ever got. Then I got a Xiaomi for a better camera and now I'm looking to get a new phone.
Haven't OnePlus gone to shit now?
They have. OnePlus was great until the OnePlus 5. Now they have become just another premium smartphone brand. Same thing will happen to Nothing eventually.
The third iteration of Nokia is back to building phones, and the smartphones they sell are part of the Android One program (stock Android, two years of updates guaranteed).
Sony, Asus, Nothing, Pixel....
I'm not doubting the hardware, but software is a real issue. Carriers are now pushing 36 month plans... what good is that if your device is basically out of date after 18 months.
Hooray, I will finally get to turn all my one handed actions into two handed actions! /s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/mmCkNx0ujKI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Niche case- I'm a maths teacher and it's been good for replying to emails from students with problems.
I've had a Galaxy Note 9 for a few years now and, at least in my use case, I rarely use the stylus. It's very convenient to have when I need to take notes in a meeting or something that I need to send a copy off somewhere, but day to day, I really only remember the stylus is there when I drop the phone and it pops out lol.
I wish I could use a stylus on my phone. When I edit photos, my fingers are less precise to hit the right spots.
Some people like to make art on their phone. Others like to use it for note taking. I came across a TikTok creator that has the S23 Ultra and he uses the stylus to edit/make photos and videos.
Some find it easier to swipe with as well.
Art, annotation, memos, hand drawn animation, business'y stuff of that nature
It kinda depends on the stylus though: Some are actual digitizers(pressure sensitivity for use as a paintbrush, some even recognize tilt and rotation for calligraphy) while others are just a rubber nib on a stick(rubber finger...on a stick..no electronics just rubber).
It's great to quickly draw a diagram or something similar to explain something to someone. I could use pen and paper but I prefer doing it on my phone since it's already there. I don't do it daily but I enjoy having this option. When I was taking a break from the Galaxy Note lineup I was sorely missing it.
Even the biggest phones, imo, just don’t have the real estate for decent note taking. Tablets, esp with low aspect ratio screens, are the sweet spot.
Tablets make total sense to me because the use for a tablet is different. I would use a stylus on a tablet with a larger screen. I wouldn’t use a stylus on my phone.
I've had situations where having a stylus even on the smaller screen of a phone wouod have been handy. Sketching with your finger is very crude. It's not something I would pay a premium for and I wouldn't want it robbing a bunch of space to fit it inside, but it would be a nice addition that I might use on and off.
It's nice for quick edits or sketches when you don't have access to a tablet. I have one and I've gotten a lot of use out of it.
I want stylus for my phone so that I can sign directly on my documents. Right now, I have to print it, then sign, then scan it.
Another use of stylus is for note taking, and solving math equations (which is often very tough to write).
"I threw away all the conveniences of my current device because I need this one extreme usecase!"
Sometimes I'm on the go and I need to highlight, underline and make comments on pdf files. A stylus makes these much easier. Other than that I've used it about once for taking a photo using the stylus when the camera was on a tripod.
I got the version with the stylus of this phone solely because the version without the stylus didn't have an NFC chip. The stylus is kinda neat though.
True. Although looking back over the last five years, and even more so since COVID, the majority of the documents I’ve had to sign that were emailed to me have been secure digital signatures so I feel like even this advantage is becoming less relevant.
Is using the stylus really more efficient than typing your notes into your phone though? I guess it’s likely a preference thing but I’m amazed there’s that big of a market for that.
There are languages that are just not convenient to type on a keyboard. A stylus combined with a proper OCR keyboard app could read the handwriting and compose messages in a lot less time.
I like it for OneNote specifically; in a uni setting it's nice to have a stylus handy to jot margin notes or drawings alongside my text input, do a non-rectangular crop on a photo I just took of the lecture slide to put in notes, or just idly doodle. Stylus pens are super smooth and gives me good brain feel when I do swooshy doodles.
I have the 2022 version of this phone, and it's great value for money in the USA. Adequate performance, lots of internal storage, headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and good battery life. I didn't buy it for the (crappy) stylus, I bought it for the good value for money.
The 2023 version most notably updates the SoC from SD695 to SD6g1, which is about 15-20% faster and more efficient. It also adds stereo speakers, which is nice. It seems like everything else is only a marginal change or the same from last year.
Man, is the US market for cheaper phones so bad that this is a contender? And this is US$400!
I would love to see comparison to the Poco F1 which at the time had the same price. I suspect its pretty close, despite the 6 years gap. That being said, the F1 was unreal value at the time.
Moto's update support has been horrible since post Googorola. They are a decent option but never a truly great one.
Not a single phone has released their proprietory camera driver blobs in recent history. I wish that would happen. There will always be a loss of image quality in custom roms which don't use the stock version on the phone.
Fairly sure Pixels can use GCam just fine on third party ROMs and the basic photography modes give identical output
Yeah, but pixels have a low market share unfortunately. Something like Samsung will have the majority market share in most countries. I had a one plus 5 and even with the gcam mod the image output was significantly low (pixels back then only had 12mp and the aspect ratio etc was terrible.)
Pixels are the standard for how custom ROMs should work, blame other OEMs for not confirming to standards and breaking APIs.
I do blame them. I also blame google for not offering those features in android in the first place.... A lot of custom rom features are available in the Samsung rom so I don't really use rooted devices anymore.
Especially hate how android changed with their anti-call recording stance, which now requires root, exposed and an xposed module just for this basic feature. Samsung offers this out of the box.
That's a bit of a weird switch. As a fellow s10e user, I got this phone because it's small. The Moto G Stylus is not small at all.
I got the s10e because it was the first thing in a store.
I'm not joking, I was dumb enough to quickly switch from iOS.
That's what I did! I was so annoyed by Apple products I grabbed a Pixel. No complaints though
Ah, coming from iPhone makes sense. You probably felt that an s10e was a "normal" sized phone. After all, it is larger than the mainline iPhones at that time. The Android market had already decided an s10e was a small phone for a niche market
Maybe,
I have to to say, my s10e is somewhat rocking and I like it's Secure Folder contanier (Haven't seen a similalur thing.)
Only issue that concerns me is the brightness, battery, and camera.
That's fine, to each their own. I'd like the opposite and my dream phone would be the size of my Galaxy S (the original one).
My curiosity is because the s10e was a somewhat niche device, but Spider89@lemmy.world explained their choice.
Moto has a history of horrible updates to its devices. This is despite the fact that Moto has a near stock UI.
Yes but in this specific case I'm skeptical about the integration of the pen with custom roms
If it wasnt for grapheneos I would get it but honestly might be a nice work phone too or a travel one
I've been getting the g power series for a while now. Battery life is important to me in my field of work. And for ~$200 it's hard to beat. No, it doesn't have a great display, or even true 5g. No OLED or high refresh rate. It does have a 5000ma battery that can last two or three days of use. Head phone jack, SD card slot. Features somehow missing from premium offerings?
