Lemmy, recommend me a good budget Android phone please
I need one for general purposes only, NOT for gaming, so I don't really care about gaming-related features.
I'm going to buy it in Asia, as that's where I live (Vietnam specifically), and would appreciate any advice. 🙂
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What does fully unlocked mean? Can such phones be sold at official retailers? And if not, why would I want it unlocked? Plus, is it easy to do so?
Unlocked means it's not tied to a carrier (mobile phone provider).
Not too sure about the rest of the world, but North America has a huge problem with carrier-locked devices. You buy a phone from YourCellProvider, and you're stuck using the phone only with YourCellProvider.
Damn america is so good at coming up with the most distopian solutions ever and it sucks that people still allow them to
It's more because they'll let you pay for the phone in two years with 0% APR, but you can't just leave, not pay, and use the phone on another provider.
Before it used to be free or heavily discounted, but now it's just a 0% APR credit service.
Ah, we don't have anything like that here.
What a pain. They finally ended this in Canada at the end of 2017. All phones sold since then have to be sold unlocked. Any phone sold before that time is likely still locked to a carrier, but that carrier must provide the unlock code for free upon request. Feels like they did this one right, and it is great to be able to keep an old flagship device for 5+ years and travel with it or move services around as needed.
You've had that for 6 years? Holy damn, I'm envious. It's OEM or get fucked over here.
In australia we have it too and really bad. Basically all phones are locked to the former nationalized carrier Telstra.
It's free and instant to unlock, you just have to ask.
Word of advice, pixel is good for software, camera but that's it. Don't take it I less you can use esim with physical sim, as it has NO double SIM slot , that's a must have feature for me. So quite useless in most of ASIA.