The World of Mid-Range Cellphones of 2020-21 and a Belated Admission

A few months ago, as 2020 came to a close, it became obvious that it was "that time" again. Time to move on, in the every-changing world of cellphones. Our 2 year contract with Sprint was up, which meant that we needed to make a decision about whether to: 

1. Stay with Sprint (now T-Mobile), or go with another carrier.
   
2. Keep our phones or move on. 
3. Some combination there-of.

 As nothing has changed in Terrell and any carrier NOT-SPRINT still didn't have good coverage there was nonexistent; we stayed with Sprint/T-Mobile. Another question was easily answered (or so we thought) with me staying with my "paid-for outright" Moto G6 phone, but everyone else was up in the air. My wife of course wanted to stay with Apple's iPhone, and daughter is also in the "ecosystem", but my son wanted to jump ship and move to Android. So this is where things start to get interesting..... 

This state of affairs set me off to do research on the current crop of "mid-range", "unlocked", Android phones. My son seemed uninterested in my long-standing use of Moto (Motorola of Lenovo manufacturer) phones such as my G. After a bit of research, it looked like much of the teens and twenties seem to be interested in the Google Pixel phones. My original belief was that they were higher-end, but my newer info indicated that Google had moved decidedly mid-range in the last 2 years beginning with the Pixel 3a. And that the Pixel 4, leaned in that direction as well. But I wanted to cast a wider net, so I looked at most everything.

This is the cast of characters as I began to do serious research into a replacement for his iPhone Xr and my aging phone G6 as well (more on that later). The cream that rose to the top ended up being the One+ Nord, the iPhone SE (which ended up being my daughter's replacement phone) and the Pixel 4/4a. So, we chased down a used Pixel 4 for him locally for $200 in good shape and it even came with a nice Spigen case.

Then we got to spend a joyful 3 hours at the formerly know as Sprint store. In the end, my wife got her traditional near-top-of-the-line iPhone 12, my daughter the iPhone SE (because they were out of the 11 and not getting any more), and my son switched to the aforementioned Google Pixel 4. He was overjoyed as much as any 17-year-old teenager could be, meaning he talked about it a bit. What about me?

I left with the same Moto G6 that I walked in with because it's me and I hate limiting myself to what the store has and I don't like to pay their retail price. .....but I was already looking! My G6 was decidedly long-in-the-tooth! Running out of storage (16Gb), slow and stuck on Android 9. What did I want to do?

I was looking at the Moto Z4 pretty hard, because I'm used to Motorola and like it's adaptability. And since it was a top-of-the-line phone, it had been available with up to 128Gb of storage. After looking at it a bit, I realized that it was getting old, I really didn't want to run around with a bunch of "Moto Mods" parts to do things with and it was still expensive while push 2 years old.

While I was looking at the Z4, I had to decide on a price level I was OK with for a replacement phone. That came down to $250 plus or minus a bit, and within the upper end of that range, sat the Google Pixel 4a. The $350 de-featured, 6-8 month younger brother of the Pixel 4. I had become suitably impressed with my son's 4 and didn't care about the features Google took out, so I started looking. These things are less than 6 months old so the prices are usually still above $300, but I was able to find an unlocked one locally in mint condition for $275.

So, after decades of use and 8-10 Motorola phones used, what made me jump? First and foremost, Lenovo hasn't done a good job of competing performance-wise with the competition in the mid-range phones. Their strategy seems to be to move down in feature-set and price, as well as performance. They are simply not part of the conversation when reviewers talk about the better mid-range phones. The other part, is the Pixel 4a is everything I want without anything I don't want (such as being an iPhone). The most important of these is a nice small size (sub 6" screen), fast for what I do, 128Gb of storage which is way more than the 16Gb that I came from, and an excellent camera. Although it doesn't have it's back covered in lenses like the iPhone Pro or Samsungs, it does have the single camera from the top-of-the-line 4XL This is a bit step for me who thought that I didn't care about the phone camera since I'm a real photographer who uses real cameras! I've finally given in and admitted that I use the phone as a camera way more than I a purpose-built one!

The Story of the "Mid-line" Cellphone

For roughly the last 3 years, I've been using the Motorola (aka Moto) G4, and has been perfectly satisfied. This is really a rather unremarkable phone and therefore it's service shouldn't be of interest in any way. And there-in lies the story......

  

I have a long history of buying Motorola's premium offerings going all the way back to the i1000 on the Nextel network. Sure, there were other devices that ranged from the very interesting Nokia 8100 of Matrix fame and my one and only Apple device; the iPhone 5s. They all served me well, but as phones got increasingly complex, I began to feel that I got nowhere near taking advantage of their capabilities. When their life expectencies were closer to 5 years and contracts were close to 2, that was OK. When those things dropped to half, it became not worth the cost. At roughly the same time, the feature set became such that one didn't need to buy "halo" device (Z4 below) to get all the features one needed. 

There were 2 paths for the makers to put these devices to market. They could go the traditional route and sell them in bulk to the big carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint etc), or sell them directly to the consumer as "unlocked" phones ready to connect with virtually any system. My Moto G4 bought from Costco was one of these. It cost me about $150 on a Black Friday sale. That makes the phone itself cost less than $5 per month (of course, there is the cost of the plan itself). That's cheap! More importantly was that over the course of the 34 months that I used it, I never wanted for anything in terms of features.

So, last week, after my G4 committed suicide by jumping into the pool at practice one day......, I went out and chased down another mid-line phone. The Moto G6 Play. 

To reinforce the concept:

• It has all the features I need and some I don't.
• It has the old Micro-USB charging port. I'm really not ready to buy a bunch of replacement cords, and it charges plenty fast enough for me!
• It has the regular 3.5mm headphone jack! 
• It was cheap. I paid $63 on eBay from a DFW seller who got it to me in 2 days.
• Despite being 2 generations newer, it's interface was comfortably familiar. 

The fact is, even if I'd have gone out and paid full price for it, the price wouldn't have been any higher than what I paid for it's predesessor, the G4. As thing would turn out, I actually ended up paying nothing for it. I won't get into that story today. But I'd have been quite happy to pay $5 a month for it's use over the next 2-3 years.