20210121 - The OnePlus 8

Wherein I discuss the only purely Android phone that I have found.

The partisan phone problem

Smartphones are basically political parties. There are whole cultural identities built around them. It's ridiculous. I am aware of the irony of a person who writes blog posts about phones complaining about people's obsession with smartphones, but that doesn't make me wrong.

In keeping with the political party analogy, there are factions within the Android party, Samsung being among the largest. Their phones are cool, especially the crazy foldable variety. But I am a traditionalist.

I have a siloed view of phones, tablets and computers. I think that a smart phone should be phone-sized and roughly phone-shaped. That a tablet should be roughly the size of a sheep of paper, and that a laptop should have a full sized keyboard. Any device that attempts to do more than that is a compromise of function.

Just give us the Android

My decision to purchase the OnePlus 8 has less to do with what it has, and more to do with what it doesn't have. It has very little vendor *stuff*. Yes, I know that Android is a Google property, and that there is probably a ton of Google crap working behind the scenes to surveil me. That is a rant for another day.

Today, I am focused on the parts that I can see. The OnePlus 8 from Verizon still has Verizon's crap that you have to contend with, but for the most part it's just native Android apps all the way down. It has the other bits that I am looking for, like NFC, a fingerprint reader, and a good screen.

I am not a photographer, so I can't speak to the quality of the camera or anything like that. It takes photos of sufficient quality that it's definitely my skill that limits how good a picture can be.