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I have been buying phones and various other electronics on Aliexpress for years, shipped to Australia.
For Australia, Aliexpress have implemented a system where the required import tax is handled during the transaction. I’ve never had a single issue with customs and there is no further paperwork. It couldn’t be any easier, and there is a level of buyer protection not quite as good as ebay in the medium term, but certainly protection if your goods don’t arrive or they arrive damaged or not as described.
For us, it is a standard 10% tax on all imports so it’s easy enough for them to calculate and pay at checkout. None of those things you mentioned are an issue.
The more realistic concern buying mobiles is if your device will support VoLTE and VoWifi out of the box in your country. Bands are generally OK these days because manufacturers rarely make a seperate device for each country anymore - all bands are generally included. The exception is, if you are using one of those weird US networks that are still using CDMA technology.
I can ignore a lot of things if the game still feels good: microtransactions being jammed down my throat I can ignore as long as they are not pay to win. Game modes that don’t interest me, I can ignore (they even give you the option to uninstall JUST warzone if you don’t play it).
The saga of COD’s super aggressive SBMM and active manipulation of the result of 1v1 encounters over the last 12 months I cannot abide. Dropped frames in the middle of a close quarters battle whilst their algorithm decides which player should come out on top to maintain engagement? Nope! If this is the direction that play is headed they are beyond redemption.
Myself and many others are out here hungering for an arcade shooter that rewards player skill and movement mastery. It’s only a matter of time until someone gets that formula right and takes a huge chunk out of the COD franchise.
Xdefiant, The Finals, Unrecord, Marathon are all possibilities, but you can’t play any of them right now.
It’s a bloody sad year for gaming imo - I prefer to play online multiplayer but since I got bored of BF 2042 and swore off of COD altogether, I am spending my time playing some of the great single player games from the last couple of years instead.
AGM’s current flagship is the G2 Guardian, and it really does feel like a flagship.
Ulefone have a huge variety of options over the last 18 months. They release phones every 5 minutes. There’s big differences between them though, especially in battery capacity and device size, which are obviously directly related. It’s impossible for me to know what will suit you. They have models like the Armor 12 5G which are closer to standard sized phones but with only 5180mAh battery, right up to devices with 13,000+mAh for some of their larger offerings.
I had the Power Armor 13 and it was way too big and heavy. 13200mAh battery. I could go almost 2 weeks without charging! Entirely too big though, it pulled my pants down.
If I were buying a new phone tomorrow the Power Armor 18T (with FLIR sensor), or the Power Armor 18 look like the best combination of features recently. Remember what I said about their release cycles! The Dimensity 900 is a better chip all round than the G99. The fact that the older PA 18 costs more than the PA19, 20 and 21 tells me what I need to know. Power Armor 18 looks like it was their most recent flagship and specs confirm this.
Power Armor 18 or 18T both weigh about the same as my G2 Guardian. I don’t find this to be too much. They fit in my normal pants pockets but they ARE going to be significantly larger and heavier than you are used to. Anything more than that is just getting ridiculous but even 400g is a major adjustment and not for everyone.
That battery will change your whole user experience. You just don’t need to think about charging. Camera should be good, great refresh rate, super fast charging and even on the standard version it has a built in laser thermometer. You decide if the thermal cam is worth the extra 170 dollars to you. Anything with a FLIR brand sensor has a premium on it. Very cool feature for me, but maybe not for you.
The G99 chipset in some of their non-flagship models is still ok and would save you a lot of money. It is still significantly faster for most tasks than what you had in the Xcover pro, but it would annoy me in daily use. I’d prefer the Dimensity 900 any day, or a snapdragon.
Stay away from their “X series” line. Same cases, shitty hardware.
Ulefone are right up at the top of this market segment. Their devices look cheap, but they are generally very durable and they work really well. They have figured out VoLTE and VoWifi connectivity globally and they shift a LOT of units. Cameras are pretty decent but share the same caveats as everyone else here. Battery is generally stellar and they should last you a good couple of years. BEWARE the tick, tick, tick, TOCK cycle. They release a lot of underspecced garbage and it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is their actual flagship. Their warranty SUCKS, but you shouldn’t need it unless you abuse your device. Extra points for making them impossible to kill on the software front too. When unlocking bootloader, rooting or flashing custom firmware Ulefone have baked in a hardware level safety net that can bring a device back from the absolute brink of death. Scenarios that would guarantee a brick on many other devices, you can ALWAYS flash back to factory state with an Ulefone. They’re the kings in that area.
CAT I would not bother with at all. You are paying for the brand, but underneath it is the absolute bottom of the barrel hardware dressed up in a premium image. They’re shite, and they fall apart to boot.
Blackview is a weird one. I have major trouble picking which of their releases are decent and which are not. They HAVE released some stellar devices over the years, and they have been around a long time but they have had some massive failures and then failed to provide any warranty or support for those that got unlucky. Screens spontaneously cracking, bits falling off, screens coming unglued, failed waterproofing etc etc. And then next quarter they will go and release something with zero flaws. Too much of a risk for my liking, but I have been tempted by their recent small form factor rugged phone. It looks great.
Doogee, Umidigi, IIIF150, Unihertz I would not touch again with a ten foot pole. I would not be at all surprised if these brands turn out to be subsidiary of one of the more successful manufacturers where they use their poorly binned chips and scrapped body designs. They’re cheap as shit, but they are pretty disposable. If you want a cheap bag of problems, that nobody will help you with…go for it.
AGM is an interesting case. I own their current flagship offering and I’ve described that experience in detail above. They have traditionally positioned themselves as the premium offering in the rugged space. Snapdragon processors, extremely high quality body manufacturing and a generally very premium feel with a price to match. They do not shift as many units as Ulefone, but they offer a physically far higher quality product. That lack of scale comes with a few issues on the software side, but in reality it is rare to see a major version update from any of these manufacturers and AGM have actually addressed several release issues via firmware updates. It’s tricky business for AGM. They have recently joined the rest in releasing low BOM devices to allow them to keep producing a true halo product when they can. When they do, the price tag at first glance makes them seem completely unappealing: why pay double the price when the feature set seems comparable to Ulefone or Blackview? It’s not the same experience. AGM actually have a real warranty which I have used, and they have real customer support agents. They worked directly with Qualcomm to build me a firmware that would get VoWifi working! You will not get that from any of the others, and it won’t feel the same when you pull it out of your pocket either. They are certainly not without issues, but it’s the best experience I’ve had to date and seems to be the only rugged brand dealing with Qualcomm. Be warned. They are steadfastly against unlocked bootloader, root or any other software mods. I doubt it will ever happen, their stuff is locked down HARD.
If you are in the USA, it would also be worth looking at what Kyocera and Sonim are up to. Both are priced relatively high, and for Kyocera I think they occupy much the same space as Samsung with the xcover line: not quite fully ruggedized, but certainly good enough for most people. I had a Kyocera back when 3G was sufficient and it was a GREAT phone. These days with VoLTE and VoWifi basically being essential, it’s not really an option for me anymore but if they entered the market here in Aus I’d jump ship. They’re great. Sonim tend to be pretty far behind on specs and super expensive, but they are pretty much impossible to beat for signal and durability…again same issues with IMS features internationally.
Well, that’s about all I have to say about that.
This has become something of an area of expertise for me over the last 10 years owing to my profession and how much time I must spend in the wilderness.
I’ll do my very best to keep this brief but I can’t make any promises.
Rugged phones are generally a major compromise in one way or another. More often than not it is the camera where you have to be willing to accept compromise. It’s not so much quality; you can get a 108MP+ main sensor made by sony or samsung in most of these devices now. It’s the software behind the camera.
I’ve used rugged phones from pretty much every manufacturer in the space and it is a problem for all of them. You can generally run a GCAM port, but your 108mp array based sensor is now only capable of producing a 12MP image, and it isn’t fast enough to capture high quality photos of moving subjects. As a still camera they can now be absolutely spectacular. Google’s HDR algorithm and AI will crank out fantastic images and amazing lighting, but they can’t cope with movement and you won’t have any hardware based stabilisation. For some of us, that lack of hardware based stabilisation is actually an asset: strapped to a motorbike or vehicle across rough dirt roads, your iphone or galaxy will suicide its image stabilization sooner or later.
The other major compromise is not universal, but it is common. Performance.
Most of the players in this space will claim every new device as ‘flagship’, ‘flagship killer’ etc. In reality, many of them run something resembling a tick, tick, tick, TOCK cycle where they are forced to produce several low BOM devices (bill of materials) and sell them for far more than they are worth, before they produce something that actually builds and maintains their brand and reputation.
Before you put your money down, you need to build an awareness of this behaviour and learn the capability of some of the chipsets that you might not have come across before. Many of the newer mediatek dimensity chipsets are highly capable and will come very close to standing their ground against midrange or industrial snapdragon chipsets. Price is often the best indicator here. As with most things, if you want something decent then you must pay for it. If the price seems too good to be true, it is.
There are MAJOR advantages in this space for those that need them. My current phone only needs charging every 4 or 5 days. It came with a really well made charge dock that does not require me to daily defeat the rubberized gasket protecting the USB-C port from water and dust. It has a thermal camera with a focusing lens over it that allows me to spot koalas at a ridiculous distance, and it works well into the daylight after my $2400 thermal scope has become useless. It has a focused LED torch on the TOP of the device that I can turn on with a physical button. It has a 3.5 watt speaker on the rear that lets me make hands-free calls in stupidly loud environments, or listen to a podcast in the shed at high volume. There’s a 1TB MicroSD for all the time that I am out of service areas and a 3.5mm jack for when my ears are feeling saucy. It feels and looks like an extremely well made NUGGET of a thing, and it makes me happy to pull it out of my pocket. It rocks an industrial snapdragon chipset and is fast as fuck with a battery that WILL NOT QUIT. I could drop it from a fire tower and it would probably live.
It also cost me $1000AUD. It also weighs 400 grams. I also had to work directly with the manufacturer to get a firmware that would enable VoWifi in Australia. I also had to wipe my phone like 3 times to get it going. It was a total pain in the arse. Overall it is a fantastic piece of hardware that fits my weird needs almost perfectly, but unless you have a similarly weird set of requirements, would I recommend that you go down the same road? Probably not.
The day I retire I will pick up the sleekest, smallest device with the most ridiculously high-speed, high-quality camera I can get my hands on. Until that time, I have a genuine need for this ridiculousness including the battery life and all the other extras.
Having said that, I do feel like rugged phones are the only segment of the market that are still actually innovating and offering unique features. Foldables are cool, sure - but besides that, in terms of mainstream phones it really doesn’t matter what you buy! They’re all making the same rectangular glass slab. The features are identical, they’re just better or worse between models and brands. At least this segment of the market still has the balls to take some risks and offer crazy shit that some people need or want.
Like you, I jumped at the xcover pro, and then the xcover 6 pro. They both died spectacularly quickly and samsung did not come to the party with anything resembling honouring a warranty. Their warranty isn’t worth shit.
In comparison, when the fingerprint sensor died on my current device, AGM had a new phone in my hand in 4 days, and didn’t ask me to return the broken one until I’d received the replacement.
I won’t receive an android version update (just security updates). The camera makes me sad, and sometimes the data connectivity going in and out of service areas takes longer than I would like.
Just based on the content of your post, I would wager that you are better off with a device from a mainstream manufacturer in a heavy duty case. If your life is as weird as mine however, maybe it is worth looking into this segment a bit further. It is far from perfect, but when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Continues…
There’s a balance point somewhere between size and battery life with resolution as a catalyst. Small phone = small battery.
The Xperica Z3C achieved ridiculous things in that space (I could get 5 days normal use out of it after rooting and tweaking kernel etc).
You couldn’t do that today though. Nobody is going to buy a phone at the resolution required to pull it off, and it would be under powered to boot.
I think this is why even “small” phones like the Zenfone aren’t really even that small…they have to be big enough to fit a decent battery. Power demands have increased and you can’t fight physics.
Not only do Sony not bother to sell them in Australia, they refuse to lend any assistance to get VoLTE and VoWifi working if you do jump through the hoops to import one.
This renders them completely useless for making voice calls in Australia as of July 2024 as our 3G network will be completely shut down by then.
It’s a major fucking bummer because I would have bought the Xperia 5 IV in a heartbeat. It’s perfect.
I would very much like to own one because of the form factor and the ironic fact that they’re one of the few phones that you can still run a proper custom rom and de-google.
Unfortunately the specs and battery life are not even in the ballpark of what I find to be acceptable. Pixels are a giant compromise.
AGM G2 Guardian. It’s a pretty exclusive club mate. AGM gambled big and I don’t think it’s really payed off for them - they haven’t shifted enough units and their profit margin was super small.
I work outdoors and live a pretty weird life, I was super super excited to find a decent snapdragon in a ruggedized device like this. The long-range thermal is legit, battery life is insane and it feels like a super high quality thing to hold. They’ve had a few little teething problems - some issues with fingerprint sensor for a few people, some screen flickering issues for others. I’ve been pretty lucky so far and I believe they are switching things up in manufacturing now.
I am presently using a super niche device. SUPER niche. So niche that I have been dealing really closely with the manufacturer, who worked with Qualcomm and made a specific firmware just to get wifi calling working for me in Australia.
I have quizzed them so many times on why they won’t support rom development. You can unlock the bootloader, but the rom files are heavily encrypted. There’s no way to extract the boot IMG so we’re dead in our tracks.
The manufacturer basically say that they have to fight so hard to gain google certification that they won’t do a single thing to risk losing it.
They’ve been pretty generous with their warranty policies so probably another reason is they don’t want to risk anyone doing overclocking etc and then having to cover device repairs or replacement.
The productivity metrics at my company were consistently up by around 150% month by month for the entire duration that we were all permanently working from home without the distraction of the office and the time sink of in person meetings where nothing is achieved.
The only reason we were forced back to a hybrid arrangement is that none of the middle managers had any work to do and it became painfully obvious how little they actually contribute. They don’t actually generate any value.
Instead of restructuring, and distributing the heinous waste of money that they and our real estate holdings represent they made the decision to limit WFH arrangements to two days per week and our metrics went right back where they were previously.
Found an old archive so I’m going to ad to the thread myself:
Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey both definitely work offline, but I’m not sure about them trying to serve you advertisements.
I also used to have a considerable library of emulated games on my phone and would use a bluetooth gamepad. I should probably go back down this road I think! I’d imagine emulation has come a long way since I was mucking around with it.
Yeah but I’m all over the adblocking front at home. This is specifically for when we travel waaay out of civilisation but my kids still want to play some games. Pretty annoying that most of them don’t work at all.
Not interested in packing the starlink dish for this purpose, I go out there to disconnect, that’s kind of the goal.
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I’ve read your replies in here. Some of your requests are misguided. You want Android 8 or 9 because anything newer will come with “more garbage”? That simply isn’t true, and there are a plethora of useful features that only arrived in Android 12 onwards.
Any bloatware can be dealt with, any animations you deem superfluous can be disabled, you can change out the launcher for something with zero bloat like Lynx.
You simply won’t find anything half reasonable to use that doesn’t have a front camera. Stick some tape over it if you are worried.
Ignoring the rest, the best deal you will find somewhere within that price range is a Galaxy S20 FE 5G.
I just bought two brand new units for my parents on ebay for $370AUD which = $250 USD.
This was the last flagship (or flagship adjacent) Samsung with a MicroSD slot. Samsung is well catered for by most of the debloating scripts around github via ADB or you can apply root method and get it clean as a whistle.
SOC is a Snapdragon 865, it supports 5G global bands really well, the cameras kick arse but aren’t crazy (12MP), it has a really great wide-angle sensor too. It’s got a higher refresh rate but low resolution, so the sizeable battery leads to an extremely generous use time. Multiple days for someone like you.
Honestly I’m not sure why’d you’d like to spend $200 on an absolute piece of junk as per your specs when you could spend $250 on a new in-box device that will blow your socks off.
I wouldn’t get too excited. I purchased a galaxy xcover 6 pro at launch. It is a recent device with a removeable plastic back cover with a gasket on it to preserve the IP68 rating, much in the same style as was popular up to the galaxy S5.
It seems like they forgot how to make that design work, because the first time I got caught in the rain it died an immediate and very hot death.
There are many other ways to carry out this design but they make the device a bit thicker which manufacturers are going to absolutely hate.
It seems like a lot of people have issues with the implementation in the cx-5. I suspect they have run too much cable between the deck and the USB port: a common cause of issues.
As the years have rolled on, Android Auto has improved in leaps and bounds. Newer decks and vehicles don’t seem to suffer such issues. I use a Kenwood DMX820WS and a brand new phone and I don’t get any of those issues at all.
My early experiences were much like yours.
I really wish I’d waited another year to buy a deck with a wireless implementation.
Android Auto is basically a ‘standard’ - your inbuilt car multimedia or head deck only knows how to speak in Android Auto or Apple Car play. Unless the manufacturer included a facility for screen mirroring (which mostly suck), it’s pretty hard to get it to do anything else.
Something like this (yes I know this one is out of stock) is probably your only option: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09H6NX9C3?redirectFromSmile=1
Box interfaces with your vehicle android auto, but is then able to pass through mirroring signal of your phone. So you interact with the in-vehicle display, but you are actually controlling your phone.
EDIT: Found it. Can be ordered with the global rom too, so you don’t have to deal with immediately flashing a rom that isn’t in Chinese. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006119419693.html