Since my Galaxy A40 is out of service right now and in needs of repair, I am using an HTC Desire 816. Despite being 8 years old it's still usable for average Joe tasks, albeit kinda slow. Definitely way more usable than some 2010 phone in 2018. It is definitely saved by its decent hardware video decoding support, where it will do 720p60 YouTube with little to no trouble, with 1080p being where it starts to struggle. But that's fine, as the screen is 720p anyways. Just don't use anything newer than AVC encoding, as the 4 Cortex A7 cores really crap out with HEVC decoding. This means no terrestrial TV with a USB tuner, as here terrestrial TV uses HEVC encoding, at 1080p50 no less (I tried some HEVC encoded 1080p30 videos recorded with the Samsung and it's slow motion territory). But hey, that's still better than many NEW Chinesium welcome phones Smoorez reviewed which crap out at 720p30 due to them using the same Mali 400MP GPU that has shit video decoding support. Its rear camera is decent enough, records 1080p30 video and has autofocus as well as flash. The pictures are also more than enough of a quality for social media where they get potatofied anyways. And it has a front camera...nothing impressive there, it just works. It supports at least 128 GB microSD cards, which helps a lot with its 8 GB of internal storage. And it does have software that allows you to automatically transfer all your files to the SD card...something that I make really significant use of.
The stereo speakers are a great feature that many phones today don't have. Its FM radio tuner is decent, it has a signal strength meter, RDS (no radiotext tho), FM stereo, and isn't susceptible to intermodulation from local stations. But it's not the most sensitive tuner, with the Samsung having a more sensitive tuner, though more susceptible to intermodulation. It doesn't support recording from the radio, unfortunately, and that's pretty niggerlicious, as I can't record potential DX reception. The audio also gets quieter with weaker signals. Did I mention it has a headphone jack?
The only glaring issue is the battery that's really showing its age, as there's no way in hell it will go any less than 30% charge without the phone suddenly shutting off, with 50% being the most common limit. Don't even dare setting the camera storage to be the SD card as that immediately KO-s the battery when you turn the camera on. And don't even dare rebooting without connecting a charger or else if the battery cuts out mid boot you can have system settings, such as keyboard selection and the wifi toggle being corrupted.
If you're really unlucky the OS getting some corrupted version of an update or reset...basically the default apps all get reset to the factory versions, with the Play store being near unusable with constant crashing. Updating it is a painstaking process and you also have to deal with constant "app xyz has stopped working" popups every minute or so. The system storage utilization also mysteriously balloons up by a gigabyte or so, which is not to be ignored as the phone has about 4 GB available for apps with a clean install. And some apps get uninstalled. I had to factory reset that bitch several times by now, but that fortunately does fix it.
My next phone...I'm honestly not sure. After I repair my Galaxy A40, I will definitely keep using it for a while. When I do eventually upgrade it, I will think twice about cheaper Chinese brands, as these lesser known cheaper brands really like to cut corners with the software in my experience...then again it could just be that my experience was with older Android versions as well, so it could be just an Android thing. I think I'll check out what Sony has to offer for its phones, as the Japs are generally known for making quality tech.
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