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Hey, help with mobile purchase. Lame topic i know but dakkadakka is mildly intelligent versus the rest of the web


Narrowed it down to Sony M5. It's £200 new at Argoose. 3GB RAM, 21mp camera, 1080 screen, high end water resistance, SD card supported, plus all the other buzz words.


Thing is i've never had to buy actually buy a smart phone, this is my 3rd smartphone. Android is forcing updates so the 2gb ram is essential imo. The Moto G 3rd Gen is £145 with good spec, 2gb, 13mp, IPX7 waterproofing, but i'm questionable on the build quality potentially. Samsung have loads of bloatware. I'm not into cracking the OS or whatever.


I ideally wanted a 4" screen up to 4.6" but it seems spec versus cost isn't worth it when that M5 can be had surprisingly cheap. I'm basically looking for a yay or nay on it, or you can recommend something else. No IOS or Windows though.


I use podcasts, bluetooth, chrome, maps, the camera, callender and the torch! That is all. I will buy a case this time. How are those glass protectors? A mate raves about them. The ones that protrude 1mm and crack instead of the actual screen.


Many thanks. Apologies for such a topic though

My daughter and I use Sony M phones and my wife has an M2.

They are pretty nice phones. Sony are good at designing and manufacturing hardware. The downside is you get the Google bloatware and the Sony bloatware.

I always put plastic film protectors on the screens, and a plastic or rubber case on the back. It saves a lot of general wear and tear. I'm reasonably careful with my phone, I never put it in a pocket with keys or coins, for instance, and it's still nearly as mint as the day I bought it.

I've been looking at the M4 Aqua, but don't feel I've had enough use out of my M yet. (There was no M3.)

Here is a TechRadar review of the M5. TechRadar are good reviewers for phones.

£200 is a good price. I would go for it.

Alternatively, you can get an M4 Aqua for under £150, which is about 18 month old preceding model of the M5.

Thanks. That review puts a negative on performance, despite the additional ram. Is the bloatware any worse than the Samsungs? I found the Moto G to be okayish regarding bloatware though.

The price difference of £30 to go from M4 to M5 isn't much considering the jump in hardware. My original budget was £100, but want to future proof at least somewhat.

The review doesn't like the slow camera. Personally I carry a "real" camera when I want to take serious photos, and I just accept the time lag on the phone camera. The other thing about the review is that they are comparing the camera's features at the original price of over £300. It's a lot better value at £200.

IDK about the bloatware on Samsungs. A lot of the Sony stuff can be removed or switched off. I've got my Sony M set up with the following apps I use a lot:

Alarm & ClockCalendar
Evernote
LastPass
Chrome Browser
Google Keep
Met Office weather
GOogle Maps
Teamer (sports team management utility)
Gmail
Line (Japanese based messaging and micro-blogging)
Twitter
TrackID
Skype
Album (photo and video album from Sony)
BBC News
GWR Trains utility
National Rail utility
Calculator
Dropbox
Quick Dice Roller
Camera
Contacts
SMS
Phone
Settings

It's a pretty decent list. The only thing I've had to remove was the X-Wing utility.

There are a load of other apps in the memory that I never use. The M model is about four years old.

XDA-Developers has custom ROMS available I believe..

I have an M4 8gb and it really does not have enough internal memory. The OS cuts that 8gb down to around 4gb and then the built in apps and updates further reduce that to the point where you have very little space to store anything such as music, videos, games etc.

Even with a big SD card you are, unless you do some tinkering with the software, at the mercy of which apps can be transferred onto the SD card and how much information they store on it. Facebook, for example, takes up 356mb total, of which 290mb can't be transferred onto the SD card.

Though it looks like the M5 has 16gb so hopefully you won't have the same problem.

Thanks for the help all. The M5 just went up in price so going to wait for the minute since this just changed everything. (below)

 Tjomball wrote:
XDA-Developers has custom ROMS available I believe..

Never even knew Android was open source! This might be the way to go with the cheaper and lesser spec phones. Sick of operating systems updating and draining memory and power that you just don't have.