Like most/all(?) phones? I mean there’s always this: uxcell Micro USB 5 Pin to RJ45 8P8C Female Network Ethernet Adapter Cable : Amazon.ca: Electronics
Just battery and camera, really, I think. They really do suck on the 5.
Wireless charging…I’ve had on my 5 and 920 before it, and I’ll miss it (at least I never paid for either pad). Doesn’t seem like a popular thing any more. Maybe fast charging and better batteries will offset it?
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The camera is supposedly better. Including dual flash, and laser-assisted auto-focus. Bigger battery, too (though I’m not sure that it’s big enough to offset the bigger battery drain of the larger screen/faster processor, and some reviews I’ve read do mention that the battery is a weak point). And support for Google Fi, which is a pretty big deal for those who have access to it (dammit Google - bring Fi and Fiber up to Canada, please!). The wireless charging fad seems to be dying off, which is a shame but not all that big of a surprise, really. I’ve never had a phone with it, so I guess it’s not something that I’ll particularly miss if it dies off completely.
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Not everyone wants to put all their stuff in the cloud, though. But certainly dumping the pictures on your phone now and again onto a computer at home is easy enough to do.
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In my specific case, as I said, it’s not a phone, it’s a Nexus 7, and it doesn’t work with USB OTG devices like the one you linked. That was the first thing I tried. 
And the owners of the run of Nexus phones and tablets that had memory problems (my spouse and son being among said owners) were screwed regardless, because there isn’t any SD slot and Google didn’t offer a fix or a recall.
Meanwhile, I rooted and booted a Nook Android tablet to Cyanogenmod, set it up to talk to the ODBC port in my hybrid car, and got Torque running on it in less time than it took me to solder up an OTG cable for the Nexus and find out that Google had purposely removed the OTG driver.
I like my Nexus 7. It is an inexpensive and capable e-reader. I run it in airplane mode probably 75% of the time, so it has reasonable battery life. But it is not particularly hacker-friendly, especially when compared to other similar devices, because google stripped the connectivity and storage options down to a functional minimum. I know this because I hack my devices fairly routinely. 
An android device with soldered-in, permanently limited memory is not as good as one that has an SD card slot, despite Google’s weird insistence otherwise.
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came here to say this. in fact the nexus line has, until last year’s model, always been significantly less than the price of the other flagship phones at the time. they would achieve this by sacrificing on the hardware, using slightly older tech. it’s incorrect to say they have been consistently more expensive until now, it’s been the opposite.
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Yeah, hold on to your hat, I actually think phone data plans are perfectly evil in their implementation and refuse to sign up for one. AND I like having high quality flac files + 320kb MP3’s + lots of pictures + a whole bunch of utilites to run on different PC’s + books + random crap
Not to mention that out of those 16 GB, not everything’s always available (depends on your phone) and my apps are going to take a large chunk of that space anyway.
I know.
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If you saved less gifs, you’d probably have more space.
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I really fancied a Nexus, but fixed batteries and no micro SD slot have put me off. I normally keep a phone at least two years - and towards the end of that batteries are normally not performing nearly as well. Not being able to swap them out means I’ve got an expensive paperweight, rather than a handy backup phone. Sadly all manufacturers seem to be going down this route at the minute. Hopefully LG might come through with something that meets my needs before my current contract is up…
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It was a big concern of mine as well. And still is, pretty much. (I didn’t realize about the lack of SD expansion slot until after I purchased it). I will say, to their credit, that after nearly three years, the battery life on the nexus 4 is still pretty decent- although it was never anything to write home about in the first place- but it has served me well enough.
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I’ve gotten really frustrated with Android the last few years. Google keeps coming out with new operating system releases, which you can only get if you either buy a Google-brand phone or tablet (where it works fine) or a new shiny vendor-customized one, but if you’ve got a non-Google Android device, good luck waiting for your vendor (and in many cases Vendor+Carrier together) to get around to upgrading it, because they’d rather sell you new hardware than support the old one.
Samsung did upgrade my G4Mini from 4.2.x to 4.4.2, but it looks like they’ve now abandoned it. HTC abandoned my Aria faster than that (especially since it was locked to Android Market, and couldn’t install apps after that became Google Play.) And nobody wants to make a phone that can actually fit in your pocket.
Presuming you mean the S4 mini… XDA has an awful lot of custom roms available
I do really like Nexus phones and the fact that it’s pure Android with swift updates (up to a point - my Galaxy Nexus stopped getting updates after 4.3) but the pricing for us in the UK isn’t great (£379 for the 32Gb model).
I’m in the market for a new phone and am pretty much sold on the Wileyfox Storm which comes with Cyanogen and decent-ish specs for a great price. The only thing I’m not sure about is how and when the OS will get updated.
One problem is that in the Android world not all space is created equal. With increasing memory it is not as bad as it once was, but it is still possible to run out of the right kind of memory while wasting space on things you don’t want. That includes things like undeletable stock apps that are already obsolete when you unbox your phone but will take up space forever while the version you actually use (or not) takes up space on top of that.
Yes, I am aware that lots of things can be fixed by rooting your phone and making the right changes or using alternative Android distributions, but I still think it is fair to judge Android devices by the typical out-of-the-box experience.
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It would be nice to see fi become an option north of the border
The first batch should have shipped in Oct… Second in Nov, etc. They are shipping in the order that they were “purchased”
Review #Jolla #SailfishOS: Shipping Schedule
Edit: one can roll your own now…
Raspberry Pi Tablet Based on Sailfish OS | Hackaday
Uhhh…
- “continuously updated without needed vendor cooperation” refers to the fact that the apps are no longer baked into the os and users can grab updates without waiting for the vendor middlemen to rubber stamp the update, not automatic updates.
- Play store automatic updates can be refused, ie: turned off completely.
- …but if you really wanted to escape the walled garden and vet the security of every app you used. You’d be sideloading them all, not using the play store.
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