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Replacement for the s4

C

chesus

Lurker
Yesterday i sadly lost my trusty S4 after six years of use and mutltiple roms/flashing adventures.
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Part of me wants to get a identical used phone but i feel that it might be time to move on and thats why i'm making this thread.
I've not been keeping track of the phone market for years and therefore have no clue what to brands are good etc.

This is what i'm looking for in a phone:
Price around 400$

Good Batterylife
Not to big screen (the s4 fit my hand perfectly) Around 140x70mm
Dont care about camera quality.
Removable battery is a plus but not needed.
Android
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Ability to root and flash custom roms with a good dev comunity. (not shure if every android phone has this)
Edit:Headphone jack
MicroSD is a plus but not must

I'm in europe if it's to any help

Thx in advance
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You are in Europe but quoting prices in $?

The first thing that comes to mind with your list is the Pixel 3a. It's slightly tall but around the right width (150x70 mm), and most phones these days are wider. Price is in your range (it's £350 in the UK Play Store today). It has a headphone jack. It's easily unlockable, so while the development community isn't that large it is at least possible, and as the device is quite new it may improve (development generally is well down on what it used to be). It doesn't have an SD card slot (it's a Google device), and doesn't have a removable battery (but you can pretty much give up on that). But for a new phone of that size and price it's the obvious one that comes to my mind.

Otherwise given the price and size constraints we're probably looking at older devices. The Galaxy S8 for example, or the S9 if you can find one at a good price (it's still a bit above your target just now on Amazon UK, who I used as they are easy to check). Neither has the sort of dev community we used to have, but they do still exist. OnePlus devices usually have good dev support but they are all larger than you want. Sony's XZ2 Compact certainly fits the size, but the dev community is small despite it being more than a year old and it lacks the headphone jack. The fact that I'm struggling to come up with suggestions tells you how bad things are currently for those who don't want a 7.5cm-wide phablet these days.
 
Hadron said:
You are in Europe but quoting prices in $?

The first thing that comes to mind with your list is the Pixel 3a. It's slightly tall but around the right width (150x70 mm), and most phones these days are wider. Price is in your range (it's £350 in the UK Play Store today). It has a headphone jack. It's easily unlockable, so while the development community isn't that large it is at least possible, and as the device is quite new it may improve (development generally is well down on what it used to be). It doesn't have an SD card slot (it's a Google device), and doesn't have a removable battery (but you can pretty much give up on that). But for a new phone of that size and price it's the obvious one that comes to my mind.

Otherwise given the price and size constraints we're probably looking at older devices. The Galaxy S8 for example, or the S9 if you can find one at a good price (it's still a bit above your target just now on Amazon UK, who I used as they are easy to check). Neither has the sort of dev community we used to have, but they do still exist. OnePlus devices usually have good dev support but they are all larger than you want. Sony's XZ2 Compact certainly fits the size, but the dev community is small despite it being more than a year old and it lacks the headphone jack. The fact that I'm struggling to come up with suggestions tells you how bad things are currently for those who don't want a 7.5cm-wide phablet these days.
Click to expand...

Thx for the in depth reply.

After alot of googleing and looking around i've realised that your last sentence summs up the situation quite well. When i get a chance i will go to a store and feel how the current day "phablets" :p feel in the hand.
So far i have given up on the removable battery and the SD card slot since todays phones have so large built in storage that i will never fill it up.
I found the xiaomi mi9t to be quite interesting since it has a big battery and good cpu for it's price, it is 2cm higher that my previous s4 but i will have to visit a store and get a feel for it.

I looked at the pixel 3a and first thing that comes to my attention is that it's abit weaker cpu wise vs the mi 9t that is abit cheaper. I also noticed that it has a platic body compared to the 9t wich might be a good thing since it wont break that easily compared to a glass back. I have understod that modern phones are not meant to have any sort of protective case. On my s4 i had a silicon/rubber case wich probably helped with it's long life time. Adding a good protective case to one of these phones would in my mind make it crazy big.

Considering the dev comunity i realised that it probably grows a lot when the phone stops getting updates.

I will look at the older generations but i feel that if i'm to get a older phone i might aswell get myself another s4 since it was'nt painfully slow cpu wise.
 
The gsmarena site has a handy 'phone finder' search function that might help you find a replacement meeting your needs:
https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?
Entering some of the specs you specified resulted in this:
https://www.gsmarena.com/results.ph...ities=1&sOSes=2&idCardslot=1&idBatRemovable=1
Doing a search entering your own particular wants will of course result in something more appropriate, and this does leave out the rootable and custom ROMs aspects. Those are things you'll have to research on your own once you've got a list of viable options.
 
@chesus Do they have prepaid or pay as you go where you live? Here in the states you can find pre paid phones ranging from $50-$900.
Last year I was at some store and in this clearance bin they were selling these Trac phones. I forget what brand it was, but the phones were going for $9.99. they were a brick style phone, screen size was 5.0, touch screen, head phone jack. .
I noticed that it had been marked down from a hundred and something to the $9.99. overall it looked like a good phone. I assume that the store had gotten too many, or they were last year's model and the store was trying to get rid of them.
But I started reading the package a little more carefully and came to the operating system information
Android 4.0 :thinking: Ice cream sandwich. I almost got it just to see how things had changed, the feel, reaction to working with an older Android version and mostly for nostalgic trip down memory lane
 
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