High Midrange or old Top Range. £450 - £850 ish.

I went from a LG G3 to OnePlus 3T to a Xiaomi K30 Ultra (variant of a Poco F2 Pro, Chinese ROM). My partner went from and old iPhone to the same. Loved the phone and the pop up camera, but the Chinese ROM, and in many aspects, Xiaomi bloatware drove us batty. Awful user experience. Is their Global ROM also rubbish?

Now it’s time for a new phone, I liked Xiaomi bang for buck but I’m wary of its software experience on their global devices (does Google assistant work out the box? Does clicking on a link in a browser route you to their horrible GetApps store? Does G maps locations work? Do they lock out custom launchers? Do notifications and syncing get pushed correctly or does the battery Optimizer aggressively shut all things down in the background?)

Our priority list as follows:

  1. AMOLED 6.5 - 6.7 inch
  2. Great camera, ideally with a telephoto
  3. Waterproof
  4. Not too plasticy a build
  5. A smooth android experience with minimal bloatware
  6. Not flagship prices but mid tier, to mid upper tier.
  7. She wants a pretty colour like purple

So my question is, what phones should be on my radar?

Current list:

Pixel 7 / pro (8 I think is too pricey, but that phone is my personal benchmark)

OPPO Reno 10+ (also a bit steep but she wants the purple)

OnePlus 12 (how’s the camera? I loved my 3T but have heard they aren’t as good as they used to be)

S22+ or S22 Ultra refurbed (cons a year old but has purple an IP68 is it a better pick than the OPPO?)

Xiaomi 12T or similar, suggestions?

Realme GT5 pro looks sick, but I have Chinese ROM ptsd

Thanks for advice. My phone knowledge is a bit rusty and their must be a bunch out there that I would never think to look at.

    • @PotjiePig@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      Good shout. Yeah I’m struggling to comprehend that people pay top tier laptop / second hand car prices for a phone. The 8 pro is basically perfect otherwise. 7 or maybe 8 vanilla could be the way to go.

      • @atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        With the deals I got for trade in and their black friday deal the pixel 8 costs me less than $300. But it doesn’t have a telephoto lens so I didn’t mention it. The 8a should be launching around May or so and will be cheaper. But it will possibly have a plastic body. Don’t know how much or a deal breaker that is considering the coating on all the pixels that are out right now. The 7a is what one of my friends has and we compared phones and his just about the same size as my 8 and the only thing he complains about is the lack of headphone jack. If you’re feeling froggy you could put Graphene OS on either one and my understanding is that this does wonders for usability for a lot of power users on either phone.