Android
Best Cheap Android Smartphones [March, 2015]
Sharp AQUOS Crystal | |||||||||
 | |||||||||
Revealed in late September and a newcomer to our list is the unique Sharp AQUOS Crystal smartphone. Sharp isn't widely known in the US for smartphones, maybe more for TVs, but its latest smartphone surely needed to make the list. The Sharp AQUOS Crystal is available from Sprint and has a 5.0-inch 720p HD display with nearly no bezels. It looks like a floating screen on top of the silver aluminum body. It's neat to see and use in person. It has the slimmest bezel of any phone, but is missing some key features that brings the price down to $239 outright, or $0 on contract. You get a 5-inch 720p display, the same quad-core processor as the new Moto G with 1.5GB of RAM, Android 4.4.4 KitKat, 8GB of storage and a decent 8 megapixel camera. It's powered by a 2040 mAh battery and is rather unique to look at and use. All for under $240. We don't know how well Sharp will handle updates, so consider that if you're looking to see Android 5.0 updates. | |||||||||
| |||||||||
Cobra Jockey
03/18/2015 at 7:44 pm
What the hell is wrong with Google lately, nothing but buggy Android OS releases for the last 3 years! Their F’ed Up my 2012 Nexus 7 with both 5.01 and 5.02. I had to do complete resets to get it even working but still crippled, hell if I’ll do this again with 5.1 and I’ve refused LolliCrap all together on my 2013 N7 32GB! Jesus, Google has turned into buggy OS Update CrApple!! Maybe we should switch to Window Mobile!!
George keith
03/22/2015 at 4:40 am
thats exactly what I will do next, turn to Windows 10 once it hits the market. Lollipop is a nightmare, full of bugs and instability and renders a phone, which cant make phone calls anymore completly useless.
Thor Aackerlund
03/22/2015 at 1:01 pm
I hear ya on the Lollipop complaints. After reading about it, I’m going to hold out for awhile for the issues to settle down. The good thing is that if you have a device already running Kitkat or older, there’s not really any pressing need to upgrade. I always like to let others do the testing if I can :) Obviously that’s not an option with a phone that comes with stock 5.0+.
Windows Phone is a fine OS, but the apps are minute by comparison. If you mainly use the built-in apps, and a handful of major market apps that are on basically everything like FB, Twitter, etc, then you are okay. If you like to use more obscure apps, you may be disappointed. Windows phones are also notorious for lacking an upgrade path. I had a flagship windows 7 phone that had more than the necessary specs to run windows 8, but of course they never bothered to do the work of actually doing it.
And of course, Apple runs the iOS treadmill where they make the releases available for their older phones, but they end up somewhat crippled in performance with the upgrades. To be fair, their phones are usually good for about 1 OS upgrade and still work fine, but by the 2nd OS release, they’re in trouble.
These things are too expensive on the high end to be obsoleted so quickly, and I find Android to be the best in terms of handling that. With custom super low resource roms, you can have a very old dual-core Android that runs like a beast outside of gaming :)
I find that many people that have complaints about Android are closely related to big carriers and some phone makers adding TONS of garbage to the OS. Android is SO much better running and stable in stock form, with only the apps and add-ons that YOU want. A stock AT&T, Verizon, etc Samsung Galaxy phone is an absolute cluster%$ck of junk. It’s a shame, because then people get the idea that Android is just a mess, when it’s just the carrier and Samsung crappiling things in there like there’s no tomorrow. It also makes the battery life a ton worse.
Ah well, use what you like, enjoy it, and always wait a little bit before ‘upgrading’ :) cheers.