Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

What I Learned from Using a 2015 Budget Phone

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About my loved Moto G 3rd Gen.

Since the beginning of 2016 I have been using the third generation Motorola Moto G. A device that set real standards in this price range at that time and is apparently still suitable to serve as a daily driver today. The first device where I don’t think after one year, I have to buy a new mobile phone again because on the old one all the applications won’t run anymore. Ok, I’m using a custom ROM, but who doesn’t do that, when it comes to developing apps and there’s just Android Marshmallow.

Why should I pay for a $1000 device when I can totally get by with the functionality of such a much cheaper device? Sure, a sharper display, a higher resolution camera, a faster processor are nice, but what about the headphone jack? Many people think that they must always have the fastest and best equipment on the market, they spend a lot of money on it. For example, if you calculate this against food, how many crepes can you buy for 800 dollars? Is it worth it? How much more productivity does it bring you? How much more money can you make with this device? Of course, there are people for whom this is worth it, but for everyone who has such a device?

Anyway, I learned to love my Moto G. I have configured it so that everything just works as it should. The camera is perfectly adequate for snapshots where only the mobile phone is present, with its 13 megapixels. The Micro SD card slot is used to keep the gigabytes of offline available Spotify music with you at all times. Via Bluetooth 4 point something, it’s connected to my Sony Smartwatch 3 all the time to alert me on the way about new messages.

Lineage OS is the best custom ROM. Just because it already had the fix for the KRACK gap before Google even thought of its own solution. Because with Lineage OS on the device, which originally came with Android Lollipop on the market and then got an update to Marshmallow, I can now also use Nougat and hopefully also Oreo in the near future, which is actually quite helpful for a developer if he doesn’t want to access the emulator all the time.

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