With Android phones, anyway, it’s simply a matter of taking the sim card from your current device and inserting it in the new one. The point is, you don’t have to tie yourself to a specific provider anymore. (I bought my last phone in an unopened box, brand new, from eBay.) These days, though, many of us buy “unlocked” phones from various retail and wholesale outlets, such as Amazon or Best Buy. Where to Buy YourĪt one time, everybody got their phones through their wireless carrier, which locked us into a particular service provider-at least for the term of the contract or until the phone was paid for. The ultimate best is relevant to application. In other words, while I do compare features here, all these phones have made the top 10 list and are therefore strong products for the userbase each one serves. The latest $1,000 Samsung Galaxy S10+, if it’s just what you need, may be best for you, or perhaps the $170 Motorola Moto G6 Play or $360 LG G6 may come with everything you need for the way you use your smartphone. They aren’t sorted in any particular order. The phones in the table below are arranged strangely, due to the fact that I could not fit them all into one table, but had to split it. The following list of the 10īest Androids encompass the gambit, from inexpensive and adequate to costly andĪnd this seems like a good spot to inject this disclaimer.
On their phones, as well as take and share photos. Nowadays, however, most people do at least some web browsing If all you need is to make calls and send texts, though, you don’t need all that processing power and to-die-for displays. Many people, especially the younger generations, use only their phones as their sole computing and entertainment devices. Today’s mobile devices come with huge compliments of storage and RAM, as much as 1TB and 12GB, respectively, and they’re incredibly fast. Today’s phones are as powerful as some desktop computers, and the displays on some of the high-end flagships are unbelievably gorgeous. While this is more conducive to quality control than Google’s approach, it’s also limiting.
Apple controls virtually everything, which, historically, from the first Mac to the iPhone X, it always has. This allows much more freedom, allowing you, developers, and phone makers to be more creative.Īpple’s iOS, on the other hand, is a closed OS. Yes, you can store more data in the cloud, but that’s not nearly as convenient as having it all right there on your phone.įrom a techie and developer standpoint, Android is a much more open operating system, meaning that users, app developers and phone manufacturers have a lot more control at the OS level. If you fill up your storage memory, you’ll have to delete items, or juggle them on and off the device.
Most Androids, for example, support storage expansions via microSD cards, these days, up to 512GB or more, whereas with iPhones you’re stuck with whatever comes on the phone. More importantly, Android is a more versatile OS with a wider range of features and personalization options. All recent iPhones, as nice as they are, are pushing or exceeding $1,000. There are several under-$400 Androids available I’ve included a couple in this review, and a few in the $500 range. There are several reasons why Android is the predominant smartphone OS, among them being that unless you’re willing to settle for an older model, all of Apple’s iPhones are high-end and expensive. Yes, there will be incremental updates, but for the most part the OS version is consistent-for now.
Since the first rollout of the next version of Android won’t happen until August or so, and then only on Google’s Pixel devices initially, those devices that are running Android 9 now will do so for a while. It will be slightly higher or lower wherever you buy your phone, and carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and so on) offer constantly changing specials when you sign up for service.įor the operating system (OS) installed on each device, by now, Android 9 (or Pie) is available for most models, so, the OS listed is the highest version available, again, at the time I write about each specific device. So, to even the playing field, for pricing info I’ve chosen to use the current Amazon price as I write about each individual model.