GSMARENA Phone Finder is pretty amazing. You can filter by basically any phone characteristic you want. Back material? Yep. Refresh rate? Also yes. Proximity sensor? You got it. Minimum wired charging wattage? Sure, why not.

I’ve yet to find a more comprehensive one.

Edit: taking a look at Kimovil. It seems like it has much of the same filters as Phone Finder, but with the bonus of also showing price, which is nice.

I check for LineageOS support, repairability (kind of pointless nowdays), a headphone jack and a SD card slot and end up buying something that just supports LineageOS because apparently I am asking too much of a modern phone… :(

Devices for LineageOS and I then use the official website to validate it, as well as GSMArena Phone Finder

I stick to Pixels because I use GrapheneOS, that makes it simple lol

Well, my first criteria is an unlockable bootloader, followed by rootability.

Those alone usually pare the options down to 2 to 4 phones, so I really don’t have to think too much about the cool features.

I expect to use my phone from 2 to 5 years, so compatibility with certain ROM producers is Aldo high on the list.

I look up what I like in a phone (headphone jack, expandable storage, led, Snapdragon…, plastic back, etc.) and use gsmsarena’s advanced search feature.

Mostly reviews tbh, hard to quantify stuff like camera quality

I don’t use a tool, I just check the sizes to narrow down if the phone can be used comfortably in one hand. This narrows the results down to 0 and I just decide to keep my current device for longer.

Download page of LineageOS 🙈.

I look at the supported devices list for LineageOS or Graphene, compare the specs to find the smallest one that’s current, then hit the classifieds to buy a used phone. Because I’m just going to break it anyway and I’ll be fucked if I use stock Android.

www.epey.com - Turkish website that can serve that purpose for a very wide variety of things. It allows filtering based on specs, comparing items side by side and shows price history. The prices and availability isn’t always complete so I usually pick what I want from there and search the web to see if they’re any lower prices. And it only lists items that are on sale in Turkey so might not be as useful to people living in other countries, but might be worth trying.

I find the size of the phone is super important to me so I also use phonesized.com to compare it to whatever my current handset is.

GSMArena has nice phone search functionality, I was using it often when thinking about upgrading, but to be frank I bought 2 of my last phones basically on release date based off specs, unboxings and first impressions I saw online, even not full reviews were online, those phones were:

• Motorola One Vision - May 2019 - 128GB of UFS storage, modern punch hole display and OIS equipped camera sounded cool, unfortunately the camera was kind of sub par, slight zoom resulted in garbage photo, also apparently Motorola couldn’t optimize for exynos because despite somewhat satisfying performance, stuttering was frequent
• OnePlus Nord 3 - July 2023 - powerful SoC, 16GB of RAM, OnePlus declares 3 years of software support, fast 80W charging, looks nice on paper, my only gripe is battery drain but they keep optimizing the software

I use the tool of nearly blind brand loyalty and waiting to upgrade until the things I need are included

guess which line of Android phones

I’m a farmer and need a rugged phone that can fall off a tractor into an irrigation ditch on a regular basis. So I buy Sonim, end of story. Usually replace them every 5 years as they never get updates and the Android version starts getting obsolete.

Unfortunately the Sonim XP10 looks to be not as sturdy as previous versions and they have walked back their previous bulletproof warranty. So I guess I’m in the market for a new ultra-rugged phone, luckily the XP8 I’m using should last for years yet