High Midrange or old Top Range. £450 - £850 ish.

I went from a LG G3 to OnePlus 3T to a Xiaomi K30 Ultra (variant of a Poco F2 Pro, Chinese ROM). My partner went from and old iPhone to the same. Loved the phone and the pop up camera, but the Chinese ROM, and in many aspects, Xiaomi bloatware drove us batty. Awful user experience. Is their Global ROM also rubbish?

Now it’s time for a new phone, I liked Xiaomi bang for buck but I’m wary of its software experience on their global devices (does Google assistant work out the box? Does clicking on a link in a browser route you to their horrible GetApps store? Does G maps locations work? Do they lock out custom launchers? Do notifications and syncing get pushed correctly or does the battery Optimizer aggressively shut all things down in the background?)

Our priority list as follows:

  1. AMOLED 6.5 - 6.7 inch
  2. Great camera, ideally with a telephoto
  3. Waterproof
  4. Not too plasticy a build
  5. A smooth android experience with minimal bloatware
  6. Not flagship prices but mid tier, to mid upper tier.
  7. She wants a pretty colour like purple

So my question is, what phones should be on my radar?

Current list:

Pixel 7 / pro (8 I think is too pricey, but that phone is my personal benchmark)

OPPO Reno 10+ (also a bit steep but she wants the purple)

OnePlus 12 (how’s the camera? I loved my 3T but have heard they aren’t as good as they used to be)

S22+ or S22 Ultra refurbed (cons a year old but has purple an IP68 is it a better pick than the OPPO?)

Xiaomi 12T or similar, suggestions?

Realme GT5 pro looks sick, but I have Chinese ROM ptsd

Thanks for advice. My phone knowledge is a bit rusty and their must be a bunch out there that I would never think to look at.

  • @LudrolEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    Some answers for my xiaomi exerience with global ROM.

    To change wallpaper or deafult ringtone you need to consent for data harvesting. I am using custom luncher no problem. There are couple of very annoing bugs: reboot messes the layout of quick actions. Sometimes open apps are missaligned. Battery optimization is so bad that sometimes my timer won’t ring to remind me that my laundry is ready. I had overslept couple of times due to this. Xiaomi really pushes for their native video, gallery and app store but it doesn’t prevent from changing the deafults.

    I also got bad QA and audio DAC was broken for me.

    I don’t use assistant but it always pops up and wants my attention

    G maps works good and links to google play open in google play.