The last smartphone I got was five years ago, in January 2021. I picked up a base iPhone 12 with 128 GB of storage, which was double the default at the time.
The phone has mostly done what I need a phone to do, and my phone use has narrowed down to just a few tasks since I got it. I am old school, so some things people do on their phones I still prefer to do on my PC, with its nice big monitor and full-size, clicky keyboard. Also, no one will ever convince me that typing on a smartphone is fun, or that editing text on the same is anything but a special kind of techno-hell.
But the reason I am writing this now is that while I’m content to use a five-year-old smartphone, my iPhone 12 is getting more, let’s call it eccentric. Most notably, it no longer accepts phone calls, which is an important part of being a phone. Instead, it shunts every call immediately to voicemail. In a way, it’s nice, but it’s gotten increasingly troublesome. I don’t know if switching to a new phone will fix this, but I’d still rather try a new phone than wipe my current phone, set everything up again, find out it fixed nothing and now be stuck with iOS 26 and “liquid glass.” So a new phone it is.
It’s not only my phone use that has changed since 2021, the major tech companies have pretty much given up on the idea of being good or decent and now they just compete on being various levels of awful. This puts me in a quandary, because if I want to jump from the iPhone because Apple is no good, switching to Google-controlled Android is not really better. It’s like someone offering you a dirt pie or mud pie for dinner.
I could get an Android phone and run a third-party OS like Graphene, but my desire to experiment has limits and I have a suspicion that fiddling around getting a phone to do the few tasks I want it to is not an area where I’m interested in exploring those limits.
But I’ve surprised myself before with how far down rabbit holes I’ve been willing to go. I mean, I never tried Linux before and I came close to making my new PC Linux-only. I might still!
Another aspect is I no longer have a desire or requirements for a flagship phone. I just don’t need the latest, best thing out there, so I’m willing to consider mid-tier phones from brands like Motorola. This is as close to exciting as getting a new phone will be for me.
I will provide further updates once I start perusing various models and brands.
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