It felt like cheap plastic crap too (imo).
The iPhone 5 was the first iOS phone with turn by turn nav and LTE which were the reasons I stuck with the Nexus phones as each one got worse. The 5's battery life was also ridiculously good in comparison and the hardware design holds up even now ten years later.
The HTC Nexus One was the best of the first three, I'm not sure why Samsung gets so much love for hardware. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus builds were both ugly and poor. The Nokia N9 was beautiful and I was bummed when Microsoft turned them into windows only devices, they would have been great android phones.
That was another thing at the time which pushed me away from android, they didn't have control over their OS because of this lack of control over hardware.
It was a little like Windows and all the crap that came installed on it, except worse because you couldn't even reset it.
I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.
I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.
I would totally love an iPhone mini because i find the Xs too big but i don’t feel like it’s worth spending money. I would also totally buy a non-googled Android (because I don’t like nowadays Apple mentality) that I could keep updated for years but it just doesn’t exists.
So here I am, with my Xs, which honestly, feels like, to me, an exceptional phone for 2022: beautiful, fast, updated, nice picture quality, reliable, and totally cheap. It would be a total dream if the App Store wasn’t a dictature or if side loading was possible.
I migrated to Android back in the IPhone 8 and IPhone 10 Max Plus++ whatever era. I just couldn't deal with a $1000 phone.
But now Apple has the IPhone SE which goes for as low as $399.
I will sometimes just buy a model or 2 back used or refurbished since they last for quite a while. You could probably get the 11 for under $500 as well.
I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?
Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.