I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall

[venta]

So, that time has come. The time when you accept that your mobile phone is not long for this world, and you need to sort out a replacement.

Unfortunately, the phone I want does not exist.

My existing phone is a Sony Xperia X8, a phone which was slightly out of date when I bought it two and a half years ago. It has tiny on-board storage, and is stuck on an old version of Android (Eclair) which doesn't let you move apps to the SD card. It came pre-installed with so much cruft (all installed as "system" apps, so they couldn't be removed) that it rapidly ran out of space and became unusable.

So eventually I gave in, rooted it, and ripped out all the crap I didn't want. I intended to put a custom ROM on it, but Sony Ericsson make that terribly difficult. The standard procedure didn't work, and the extra steps to unlock the bootloader were only provided by people who write in hysterical red comic sans on the internet. Also, the instructions were very conflicting - with, of course, a bricked phone at the end if it goes wrong. I gave up on the idea of a custom ROM, and stuck with the stock one.

Anyway, once again my phone is refusing to receive text messages at intervals, complaining that there is no free space. I'm pretty sure there is. It's also developed various other idiosyncrasies which vary from mildly irritating to rendering it borderline unusable. It's time for a new phone.

Now... I use Android a lot at work. We have various "nice" phones about the office, so I'm used to using them. I'd like a reasonably high-end phone. However! I keep my phone in the front pocket of my jeans, so it needs to be reasonably compact to fit in. A compact high-end phone?

Forget it.

Oh yes, say the mobile phone salespersons: You want an S4 Mini, the compact version of the mega-selling S4. And indeed, it looks like a nice phone. I'd happily own one. It's even ready to cope with 4G when that comes along. What they don't mention is that an S4 Mini is only "mini" when put next to an S4 (a phone which is famously chuffin' enormous). The S4 Mini is not, in any other sense, mini. It is bigger than an iPhone 5, and protrudes in a very "steal me, steal me" kind of way from my pocket.

Instead they pointed me at various phones: the Galaxy Ace, the Galaxy Fame, the Galaxy Y (all from Samsung), the LG Optimus 3II, the HTC Desire C... they all have one thing in common. They are slow, and clunky. They have physically bigger screens than my existing phone, but are the same resolution, meaning the text looks poor and fuzzy on them. Basically, except for not being out of space and not crashing repeatedly, they seem like a downgrade from my existing phone.

After a lot of trawling around, the HTC Desire X, the Galaxy Ace 2 or the LG Optimus 5 II look like my best bets. They are all a bit too big or a bit too slow, but they're the closest I can manage. But they're all notionally in the "budget" range, and thus not really the market I intended to shop in. I want a shiny new toy, dammit.

Sadly, my options seem to be: buy a crappy phone that fits in my jeans pocket, or accept that I need to start carrying a handbag (or wear combats all the time). Out of interest, are there any other pocket-carriers out there, and how do you manage? Front pocket, back pocket? I suspect being a girl might be part of the issue, as girls' jeans seem invariably to have quite shallow pockets. (Yes, I have considered altering the pocket lining to make the pocket deeper; it may yet come to that.)


Current working plan is to backup all the data from my existing phone, do a factory reset, and hope that'll clear it up enough to let me squeeze a few more months' use out of it while I try to make a decision, and hope some new phones come out.

Comments

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I used a Motorola Razr for years, and it was a lovely phone for its time, and the software seemed no more appalling than anyone else's. I think it went downhill rapidly from there through.

Have you looked at phones by Huawei. I'm not sure if they have something sufficiently small, but they do seem to be interested in catering to the budget conscious techie market, so might have something that would suit.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The Huawei phones which I saw in the wild yesterday were all large, certainly. I was hoping rather to get out of the budget market, and into the shiny market, and will only end up there if I'm buying a compromise phone.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

My experience with Huawei phones is that they are utterly terrible, though this is largely based on the one my co-worker had that became a byword for incompatibility and unreliability, to the extent that we basically ignored any bug reports from him until he repro'd them on another phone. He now has a Nexus 4.

[venta.livejournal.com]

A few colleagues have Nexus 4s and they do look like nice phones... but from my sample size of three, two people have already broken the screens by dropping them (twice, in one guy's case). Obviously: don't drop your phone. Or buy it some sort of protective cover.

However, I know from experience that I drop my phone a lot. Thus far it has bounced - and occasionally needed reassembly - but never broken. So I think the big-slab-o-glass design is one I probably shouldn't go for, even without reference to pocket-based issues.