It’s time we accepted that we’ve been duped. We’ve paid a premium for devices with mediocre hardware and poorly designed software.
The flashy lights and false sense of community blinded us to reality.
My device is a 2A+ (remember, it went on sale for over €400), but I know for a fact that they all follow the same pattern.
The camera is terrible, with no quality, no zoom, light flashes, and at night it’s a bad joke. My 2015 Xperia Z1 Compact takes better photos, please…
The components are unworthy of a €400+ mobile phone (processor, UFS, brightness nits, etc.).
The worst thing is undoubtedly the software. There’s no real work behind it. We’re on version 4.0 and it still feels like it’s in its infancy. What’s more, I would dare to say that it has regressed.
For a layer so similar to pure Android with hardly any additions, it doesn’t feel light… The animations don’t feel fluid, there are inconsistencies, and the device feels slow in general. There are only bugs, bugs, and more bugs.
On the other hand, we have a total lack of features and customisation. We don’t have basic everyday features and have to resort to third-party applications (loss of aesthetics, transfer of our data, battery consumption, lack of integration…). Of course, no system apps (that means work and development)
Since I updated to NOS 4.0, every few hours or once a day, the device’s vibration stops working. Haptics are lost throughout the system: notifications, calls, keyboard… It only works again when I restart. And then it starts all over again. Of course, no solutions for two months now.
The charging connector feels loose and the charger comes off very easily. I’ve cleaned it and it’s still not working, so I assume it’s the fault of the mediocre hardware I mentioned earlier.
The battery, on the other hand, has suffered a terrible decline in just over a year. On top of that, it takes ages to charge (it’s like going back to 2015 when we used 5W chargers and it took 2 hours for the phone to reach 100%).
We could also talk about how, after only a few years and with so few phones on the market, they have marginalised some devices with the Essential Button (very easy to implement for everyone via software), but that might be an uncomfortable conversation for many fanboys…
You can draw your own conclusions and delude yourselves, but I’m quite clear about it.
