Hardware keyboard isn't something I need personally, but it would certainly be useful; At least add a T9 keyboard, it shouldn't be hard to adapt autocorrect for that.
Good battery life isn't enough: I'd rather have a battery that's twice the size (6-7Ah). This makes it 5mm thicker and 5mm thicker? That's fine with me.
Not everyone cares about the camera on their phone. Dedicated cameras are still a thing, and cheap ones still work better than your expensive smartphone. Being able to read QR and bar codes is enough for me.
And to get it off my chest: give me back my buttons. I want hardware buttons on the side. Give me a home button (I don't care how big the bezel is) and instead of having an assistant button, add a pair of customizable buttons to the side of the screen (scroll for browsers and ebooks, skip/seek media, browser history, launch an app, etc). The best thing about desktop/laptop is being able to set hotkeys
And as someone who likes using tablets, please make your tablets support cases/covers that don't require a clamshell. The Nvidia shield tablet (at least) has magnetic notches in the side, which match up to magnetic tabs on the side of the cover, allowing it to be attached/removed easily. Clamshells are annoying.
Idk about rooting tho. That's a maybe. If I could throw down 500$+ I'd be able to find out.
My LG v20 was purchased the week it came out cause I'm an audiophile. This thing is literally bullet proof and 100$ now. Best phone I've ever owned. Still using it. Rooted n debloated stock ROMs are all I'm interested in all the custom ones never get updates correctly.
I have a pre-order, but right now I'd give it a few months while they sort out production, they seem to be hitting a lot of issues with quality of components which means orders are delayed.
Supposedly there's so many Android phones but all are removing things. You can get phones with these, but then their support doesn't last long and generally no one cares about maintaining a replacement OS like Lineage OS.
My ideal phone would have:
- size that does fit in a hand
- phone jack
- sdcard
- hardware keyboard
- ir blaster
- stereo speakers that actually face the user
- work with frequencies of my cell provider
- easy to root
- good battery life
- easy to open and fix
- recent hardware (I rarely play games but want it to be responsive)
But since then I started giving up on some features though those 3 are still important to me.
It's impossible to find one that has all of those things now, the only phones that I owned and really like and were very close to ideal were Motorola Droid 1, and HTC One M8 and it feels like it only goes downhill.