My venerable Moto G5 has developed multiple independent problems. Thus I’m in the marked for a new phone and I’m looking for suggestions.
I don’t have many requirements, but those are non-negotiable:
- Must have a headphone jack
- Must have expandable storage (AFAIK that still means an SD card slot)
Bonus points for:
3) a large battery
4) not being from a chinese company
5) not having that ridiculous array of cameras on the back that seems to be common nowadays (I do want to be able take photos, but they don’t have to be good)
6) not having a selfie camera that is built into the screen
7) being a rugged / outdoors phone (which seems to correlate with point 3)
8) allows for an alternative OS, or maybe even comes with one preinstalled.
Price doesn’t really matter beyond me not wanting to get ripped off.
I already looked around a bit and found a couple of options:
a) Volla Phone X23: German company, comes with the option of their Android spin-off or Ubuntu Touch. Even has a replaceable battery. But the screenshot of the spin-off don’t look like it would be for me and Ubuntu Touch doesn’t seem to be quite there yet
b) AGM H5 Pro: from Portugal, a rugged phone, but only comes with Android 12 and I found no information on which version it can updated to. Also since it’s kinda niche, I guess I can’t put a non-google Android on it.
c) Moto G56: upgrade from what I have now. Back then I chose a Motorola because I was told I comes with the least amount of garbage pre-installed, is this still true?
I couldn’t find it in the list of models LineageOS supports, but since a lot of other models are listed I attribute that to the G56 being new, right?
d) hopefully you can give me some better options
Thank you!
Consider you might be able to swap Volla’s launcher for another one off the app stores. I don’t know how whether this is supported but it is a thing you can do on a regular android device so I’d at least look into it
Hear me out.
Get a Fiio KA5 (or similar).
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It’s negligibly tiny.
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It’s cheap.
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It works between smartphones. You can keep it a decade+.
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Now your headphones work with anything.
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Sound clarity/noise floor/volume level is better than any phone.
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Better sound quality from your PC. Or TV. Or anything.
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Now your choice of phone isn’t so restricted, so you can find a deeply discounted one.
What’s the downside? I get some dongles being annoying, like the Apple ports meme, but this tiny thing has caused me precisely zero inconvenience and brought me tons of convenience.
I know these DACs are awesome. But I really like the option to plug directly into the phone. Especially since the only reason not to have that is so that Apple and Samsung can sell you crappy, overpriced Bluetooth buds.
It does plug directly into the phone! It literally just lives on my headphone cable, and it’s so light the 3.5mm cable is the basically same as with it off or on.
I suppose the only downside is if other using your phone want to plug in, and they happen to not have the dongle. Or if you want it for an older car maybe.
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I think some of the Experias still have all that.
Yo check out the Galaxy xcover 7. Rugged, large battery, expandable storage, headphone jack, no huge camera array, from a reputable korean company. Looking at upgrading to this phone myself although I can’t bear to let go of my Galaxy s10e
I always tried to avoid Samsung because of the amount of crapware pre-installed. Are the rugged versions better in this regard?
No idea, I didn’t have much trouble with my galaxy though. I think most of the crap comes from the carrier versions so if they have a generic version it’s not too bad.
I think Sony allows the bootloader to be unlocked, so i would go for the new Xperia 10 vii and just put a beefy case on it to be honest. Not only does it have the 3,5mm jack, but also SD card slot, no stupid punchhole/camera cutout, has a good battery, is a ‘normal’ size (6.1"). If i didn’t went with the Fairphone 6, i’d go for that one.
Those rugged phones are falling short in many ways, and most of them are pricey too. And Motorola isn’t what they used to be, sadly.
That goes on the short list. Thank you!
Honourable mention for the Xperia 1V as well, worth the price if you can get one refurbished (Unfortunately there’s a bit of bloat but if you’re looking to have your own OS on it then not an issue)
I am a big fan of my xperia 5v. Yes, its not current but its still a great size, great battery, removable storage, ip rated, and has a headphone jack. You can probably get them cheaper now too. I think I paid $500 a year ago for mine when I was shopping it vs the 10vi.
U seem to know a bit about sony, are they able to read NTFS file system or only exfat?
Honestly, i’m not sure. But it seems that (some) Sony phones supported that natively in the past, so it could be.
I would check some Sony related communities if i were you. If i see something regarding this, i will let you know!
You’re asking for something that was already becoming rare 10 years ago.
Are you referring to the headphone jack or the sd card slot? Because geizhals.de shows 144 models having both running Android 15, ranging from 1500€ to under 100€ in price. Looks like plenty of options to me.
What years did those come out? Because yes I haven’t personally seen more than a couple of phones with those things in years
Filtering to Android models that came out in 2025 yields 250 results.
Huh, that’s surprising. When I went looking for models like that any time I’d find one it was either lacking in other ways or only available in non-US countries. Maybe you live somewhere where this doesn’t apply, or maybe a backlash against losing those features has occurred over the years
The BraX3 meets most of these, definitely not rugged tho: https://www.braxtech.net/product
Careful apparently the founder (Rob Braxman) is a scam artist.
He and the GrapheneOS guy have beef but people are getting their phones so
That one looks amazing, thank you! Not sure I can hold out until December though.
Have you looked at the Murena phone options? https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
Only the Teracube seems to have a headphone jack, and as far as I can tell the Volla X23 would be the better option in every category.
It depends, I have a Teracube and I have zero complaints. I don’t game on my phone or do anything else intensive
I have an AGM H6 since a time and it’s a rugged simple phone with headphone jack. Also pretty affordable. I think I’m havig a problem with disabling gemini but otherwise pretty ok. Stands to note I do use another phone for gaming and such. So the AGM just handles comms and browsing.
If not I heard very good things about the blackview phones. Also rugged.The current Moto G series (US market) has headphone jack, microsdxc slot, decent battery runtime, and fairly easy availability of replacement batteries. Missing some of the other stuff on your list, but I’m happy with my Stylus 5g 2023 model regardless. Someone in another thread said these models aren’t being sold in the EU, but maybe you can import one somehow if that’s where you are. For the US models, see: https://www.motorola.com/us/en/family/g.html
I doubt the added hassle of importing will be worth it. Those model numbers are really confusing. What would be the difference between the moto g56 5G that is available in the EU and the moto g stylus - 2025 that is available on the US site? The US site just says “Snapdragon® 6 Gen 3 Mobile Platform” for CPU which means absolutely nothing to me.
Gsmarena allows you to compare phones side by side, including benchmark results
You could look on some site like androidpolice.com maybe? Or just see whether your network’s frequency bands are supported by a given phone model. Most new phones work internationally, I think. I know it’s not too hard to get EU models in the US from amazon or ebay. Maybe the reverse is also true.
Try versus.com . Put in your selection criteria, it’ll give you a list of phones that meet that criteria. You can pull them up together to compare features, and they have an overall rating as well.
Some of the niche retailers that might fit OPs criteria are nkt there
Iam planning to get Moto g100 again eventually. You can still get new ones from ebay.
I had one but i ended using the original ROM. You cant unlock the bootloader right away, and by the time I could unlock it, I had it alredy set up.
Then one day a charger failed and fried the phone.
I have g84 now and the g100 ran circles around it in terms of cpu. It also had video output on USB C which was handy.
I’m using a Moto G Stylus 2023, about to upgrade to the 2025 version if they have a good sale on Black Friday. It has expandable storage with a Micro SD Card and a standard headphone jack, plus a built in stylus which is nice.
That phone honestly looks great…
But one huge downside for many: It seems only to be available in North America… :-(
Back then I chose a Motorola because I was told I comes with the least amount of garbage pre-installed, is this still true?
This was definitely still true for the Moto G72 I am using for almost three years now, but had already changed for the Moto G54 my girlfriend bought 1.5 years ago.
This one had several unwanted and unremovable crap apps preinstalled. One forced itself to the screensaver with a button you often accidentally pushed that then started downloading and showing animated screens that led to online ads when you clicked on them. Very hard to disable and would return after each Firmware update…I couldn’t find it in the list of models LineageOS supports
And being a device with a Mediatek chipset it is unfortunately very unlikely to ever appear there.
Then the Motorola goes to the bottom of the list. Thank you
If you’re thinking like that, consider a second hand Pixel 8(a) GrapheneOS and 7 years of security updates… Zero crapware. I combine it with a Qudelix-5K which gets me back a very high fidelity (48/96 Khz 32bit) audio jack via bluetooth.
How do you handle the lack of storage space?
Edit: I meant extra SD slot.
Automated rotation of a large music library on a weekly basis via syncthing, I prefer an offline solution, (but navidrome is there if needed) ~150Gb containing all my playlists and a random selection of other albums keeps me well stocked with old and new. That leaves plenty for taking photos / video (which all gets backed to immich anyway). I don’t consume video on tiny screens. 256Gb is plenty for me with this system, 128 would probably do fine.
I am however thinking of hacking together a RasPi type device with a nvme drive, good audio and a backlit ePaper screen and perhaps GPS (music, books and maps covers 85+% of my use case, a standalone camera would get another 10+% ) which would reduce my need for a personal surveillance device being on significantly. Project suggestions gratefully received.
Want all the radio releases albums and billboard top 100 between 1955-2004? It’s insane
Thanks anyway, but my backlog of stuff that needs listening to is plenty big enough already.
Nokia XR21 has a headphone jack and is rugged.
If you want to run Lineage OS you can check the phones on this list.
But sadly no SD-card, that’s a no-go with a paltry 128GB of storage. The XR20 does have an SD-card slot, but is 4 years old by now.
128gb, paltry??? Are you keeping an offline copy of your movie library?!
It’s my music library, but yes.
I am like you…I’ve got 128 on phone and 512 SD card. As I’m reading this thred and looking what’s on my phone and storage I’ve got a lot of stuff I’m carrying around I don’t need to… Also my music library would never fit on anything under a terabyte.
Jesus, what do you do that necessitates having that much? I don’t think I could listen to that much music if I tried.
Well to be fair, it’s mostly flac. Which isn’t exactly reasonable to have on a phone, but it serves as an extra backup.
And I see no reason why a new phone can’t do something my nearly a decade old phone could do.It’s definitely reasonable if you’re using good wired headphones and if the phone has a good DAC
I keep a 1tb SSD of lossless music plugged into my car so I can definitely relate
Get a separate dac. I love my Ifi Zen, its just so cool and hilariously impractical; bigger that the phone, two wires stickin out; accidental volume changes etc.
Blud I need a headphone jack so I can plug my earbuds so I can pick up a call without using my hands. I’m not using IEM or listening to 96 bitrate stuff
Seems my sales pitch didn’t work. Did I mention you can duct tape the dac to the phone directly and get cavity searched at airports.
How thorough are those cavity searches while using that setup? Asking for a friend.
That depends on the length of yer beard. About 1 hour per inch.
Go on…tell me more. What IEM do you prefer and is the search gloved or ungloved?
Shanling ME500. It starts gloved.
