Mobiles and tech stuff

One for the techies among you, I guess. My phone is three years old and showing it, so thought I'd try to bag a new one in the Black Friday sales.

I'm very much in the budget to mid-range market (SIM-free, not contract), and would probably stretch to 500 quid if the deal was decent enough. Had initially identified either the Samsung A54 or Google Pixel 7a, but happy to take any other suggestions. I'm Android, not Apple.

For Tricky's info, I'm not looking to melt down any metal in the house and build a bespoke phone from the ground up or anything. Just a solid, reliable one to handle average daily work and personal use, with some socials and video, etc. I'm not a gamer so don't need anything fancy in that regard.

Get an iPhone, they just work.

Pixel 7a is a good choice. I'd get that, or the best OnePlus within your budget bracket. I would not buy a Samsung. They're crap IMHO.

Perhaps so, but I can't be arsed porting everything over when a new Android does all that for me without a load of additional ballache.

I'd be getting this if I was buying a new phone

www.oneplus.com/uk/oneplus-nord-3-5g

This is true. For the same reason our household are on Apple. Just port it all over quickly and stay logged in to cloud stuff.

Have you considered a Blackberry?

Out of interest, what's the issue with Samsung? Not had one for a while but the last one was decent from memory.

I've had nothing but Samsung for the last 7 or 8 years and they're great. Current one is 4 years old and still works perfectly, albeit battery life is starting to fade a little.

I'm prejudice from the one I had about ten years ago to be honest. It broke after some minor impacts. Plus it had lots of Samsung custom apps that I couldn't remove i.e. their own skin on Google calendar and contacts.

Thanks for this thread. Wife's phone, a Samsung, in perfect working order, 3 years old, has decided to start rebooting on its own then getting stuck on the Samsung boot screen.

Was also looking at the Pixel 7a. But then looked at the 6a and thought not much difference. Then looked at the 4a and thought not much difference. She moans about her eyes hurting, so I considered the TCL 40 Nxtpaper. She told me I should choose as I know better.

No idea, but £379 for the Pixel 7a is maximum budget. She's not worth a penny more.

For many years I chased the next new phone, desperate to have the latest features and tools and capabilities. But about ten years ago the script flipped and I suddenly realised that my phone was capable of more than I needed it to be, and I went from finding or creating excuses to replace it to actively avoiding having to. I think it's entirely reasonable that you might look at a model or even two behind the current one and consider it completely suitable for your needs.

The only challenge I can potentially see is that it will reach its limit of OS upgrades earlier than a more current one, but I suspect you'll probably still get to the end of the phone's life before you get stuck unable to use the latest OS.

Agreed. Sensible plan seems to be to fix a budget and then see what the best offer is for Black Friday. Think deals are supposed to start landing later this week.

Tesco mobile had some Black Friday offers up already. Think you need a Clubcard for the offers tho.

I use them and they use O2’s network. Always been good. I’m looking at upgrading my iPhone 11 to the 14pro as there’s a good pay monthly offer on and my contract is up - on some contracts you can choose a Clubcard benefit and either get an extra GB of data or knock £2 a month off your bill.

To echo Jake and Russ, I bought Samsung Galaxy 10+ for about 250 quid, refurb from Music Magpie (with some trepidation), 2 years ago as a 'stop gap', thinking I'll splash out on something more current and shiny with terraquad multi vectorising quantum nimbus 7 processing technology running Vienetta 3.7i in 6 months or so.

It's still more than capable of doing the very useful things very well, is not embarrassing in the looks department and, while the battery life is a tad less than it once was was, it will give a couple of days steady use with intermittent streaming, browsing and nefarious Talkbacking from the office.

I'm struggling to imagine how much you can actually feasibly upgrade technologically for mass production now before we get to teleportation and time travel.

Don't think I've ever had two days battery use even from a brand new phone.

And O2 are totally and utterly shit. Their reception is appalling. Great for travel to Europe as it's included still. Not so good if you actually want to use it at home.

I recently realised I was getting totally rinsed. Paying £28 a month (SIM only no contract), for 16GB of data. Changed to Smarty - paying £8 now. Same for the wife. Annoyed I didn't do it months ago.

smarty.co.uk/