Why I love my cheap phone: not sponsored, just truth.

hey everybody how's it going so today what i'd like to do is i'd like to compare two devices the samsung galaxy s9 plus to my moto g7 so a lot of people ask me what phone i use why will i review it i don't like doing this stuff for a few reasons the first is that the things that i notice when i use a device what i but what i care about matters to me is often not what matters to most ordinary people and i just also don't have the time and the inclination to do all of the you know the fancy camera angles and putting all the crap on the screen and you know doing you know the geek bench or whatever the hell else people do when they when they review products nowadays or the that show how fast the processor is what i care about when i use a phone is really very different from what a lot of other people usually tend to care about so what really took me off guard when i tried this was how bad it was in contrast to my 140 dollar moto g which is currently the phone that i used so the first thing that i want to do here is go over the screen because and the ergonomics of it because that's the first thing that made me want to curse this phone out when i tried it so the first thing i'm going to do here is just load up something that will allow me to scroll a little bit i got the blue light filter cranked a little bit more on the samsung on the moto which is why the screen looks different first thing that you notice immediately is that samsung does this [ __ ] where the screen wraps alongside the edge so rather than the screen coming to an end over here and then the phone boxing itself off like a square it rounds off to the edge because there's this modern obsession with making the bezel smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller because you can define a phone's worth by the size of its bezel the screen must go to the full edge of the phone and if it doesn't by god it's just it it must be a piece of crap now what i don't like about this is that since the touchscreen and lcd is going past the edge over here if i hold the phone i have to hold it like this or get some sort of special case or hold it like this to avoid touching it where i where it's not going to work properly so see i can scroll if i hold it like this but let's say i hold it like this then see that my middle finger is actually touching this over here and it caused it to zoom in to think i have two fingers touching it or if i do this let's say my my fat palm over here for the people in the comments that have fat palms see see what it's doing you see how like i can't really scroll well anymore that annoying stuff like that happens to me all the time with this because right now it is uh 20 degrees outside in new york city so when i grab my phone to use it outside it's not like when i'm using it inside where i i have the luxury of let me grab it and let me embrace it with my finger right over here kind of crap it's like i'm trying to not get frostbite so i'm looking at my phone i'm probably freezing i'm doing this and and when this happens it drives me crazy whereas with this phone which again costs considerably less money i can hold it even if i were to hold it like that and like grab and squeeze i can easily scroll i can easily click on things uh yeah you know you can easily click on any of the any of these things i'm not like you know accidentally selecting anything because the screen does not go all the way to the edge because they did not do that so this is something i don't think samsung recognizes but people have palms and when they hold the phone they also have fingers on the other side and if you make the side of the screen sensitive to touch then that's going to touch it and that's going to [ __ ] with you using the phone so this obsession with getting rid of bezels entirely has evolved to the insanity of having the screen actually go off into the edge of the phone which to me is the stupidest [ __ ] thing i could ever imagine now the only other reason i can imagine doing this other than the desire for the small bezels is to eliminate the aftermarket screen market so the aftermarket screen market would allow people to repair their devices affordably this is pure speculation from my part but i've noticed that samsung and companies like samsung often tend to copy apple on everything that they do and one of those things is you know [ __ ] allowing poor people to fix their devices and one of the ways you do that is by having the device have a curved screen so if you're like if you're samsung or lg you could you can produce curved screens just fine if you're chime or au optronics maybe you can if you're some random company that you know that that pumps out 15 000 screens or 30 000 screens for the after market repair market because remember when these phones come out these screens can be 300 400 that's crazy if if you're one of those places that produces an aftermarket screen where you get maybe 80 or 70 the quality of the original but the screen's 50 bucks you're not going to be able to produce a screen that is uh that's curved in that way that's something that you need to be a bit more advanced to be able to do and that's not something that a lot of the third party screen manufacturers will be able to do they're just not as sophisticated as samsung or lg yet they can't do that that's also why you'll see knock off screens for cell phones but you don't see a lot of knock off screens for laptops because making a 15 or 17 or 17.3 in a screen if you're one of those smaller factories is a difficult thing to do now this is another thing that i wanted to go over with this device before we get you get into everything else is its ability to be used outside when it is cold now lithium-ion batteries do not perform as well when it is cold outside that i understand i also understand the fact that while you can discharge a lithium ion battery when it's kind of cold it charging it while it is below freezing is an absolute no no and i am not trying to charge these phones either of them or any lithium-ion battery when it's freezing however i do have the phone on a mount on my bike sometimes i'm going 20 miles an hour sometimes 10 sometimes 30 or 40 and what i've noticed is that this phone this moto g that costs 140 never turns off it doesn't matter if i'm riding through 20 degrees 35 miles an hour wind chill for half an hour it's fine and everything functions this samsung over here if it gets to be 36 degrees that's not even below freezing yet and i'm riding and there's some wind show off that 36 degrees hitting the phone it will reboot repeatedly and turn off because it's not able to deal with it even if i'm just idling even if i'm not playing a podcast or listening to a youtube video it's just sitting there with its screen on and nothing else that will kill it that's weird now again i completely understand the fact that lithium-ion batteries are going to degrade in their performance when it is cold outside that being said the six hundred dollar phone becomes unusable on a bike when it was 36 degrees it shut off several times over the past few days even when it was 36 degrees at night this thing continues to work like a champ for 45 minutes at a time when it is 20 degrees outside so that was a considerable disappointment for me was the fact that this phone is completely incompatible with my use case because when it is cold outside i can't use this thing it doesn't work the next thing to go over here and the bat the battery life on it is decent it's not like i get bad battery life with it it's just that when i go outside in the cold it's not like the battery life sinks it's just dead next thing to go over here is the radio on the device so one of the things that i noticed is that when it comes to wi-fi this device gives out considerably before this one does so i'm going to connect to my store wi-fi here let's just get both the phones over here so we're going to connect to the store wi-fi and i will show you this with a speed test so we're going to open up openspeedtest.com over here and i will try to do an open speed test with each of these devices and you can see what we get with each of them so yeah i'm getting messages on this one so i'm just going to move that out the way okay so this just got 62 millisecond ping and let's see if it loads my speed test the the problem that i have with this one is not simply limited to the radio when it comes to wi-fi but also bluetooth so even if i use bluetooth and i don't use a higher end codec like aptx hd i will still get considerably less range with the samsung than i do with the moto so there are times where i'm holding it in my hand and it works and then i go to put the phone in my pocket and the bluetooth starts jittering or jattering and i'll take it out and put it back in my pocket again and it'll work so as you can see here this is crawling this it got a download of 0.04 megabit per second i'm not even going to continue to the upload test because that at this point is a joke now i am far away from my router i want to be clear here i am far away from my wireless access point i'm in my office and the wireless access point is in the front this is not an ideal wi-fi setup but i'm just doing this so that i can demonstrate to you how in a non-ideal setup this 140 device is absolutely spanking this uh this 600 plus dollar device when it came out i think it's worth like 300 now in the used market okay so we got open speed test here on this little model i'm going to hit the play button and let's see where it goes see if we get anything better all right we're getting we got a 13 millisecond ping time and 0.22 megabit per second which is uh here we go it's climbing now a little bit up to one again this is not exactly the best speed here but it is considerably better than the samsung now again this is not an ideal condition to keep in mind here i am far away from my wireless access point in this office and i should have another wireless access point here the point that i'm demonstrating to you is that the wi-fi on my 140 phone is beating the wi-fi on a phone that when it came out retailed for over 600 dollars this is the same as with the the my experience with how it deals with me just wanting a scroll is worse on the 600 one same as my experience when i go to use it outside is worse on the 600 one so there's this thing that a lot of people do with a judge the entirety of a device often based on the advertising of the price and things like that where if a device is well engineered really like at 140 bucks you can get something that many ways is better now to be clear this camera on the motorola is dog [ __ ] i don't use this as a camera if i'm doing videos while i'm out for youtube i have a dji action camera on my helmet that i use as my dash cam in case someone hits me or i have proof that you know i wasn't in the wrong i use that i use that camera for that purpose so because i have a secondary camera i can live with the fact that the camera in my phone's a piece of ship the camera in this phone though is a piece of [ __ ] the video it takes is horrible the pictures that it takes are horrible the camera in this phone is good and the quality of the screen for let's say viewing a movie or viewing a television show is considerably better on this phone than it is on the moto even if the ergonomics of it are not that great that's clearly better on here and frankly i would expect it for the fact that it's four times the price but all these little things like the little things that make up the feel of using a device how easy is it to scroll and not touch the wrong thing how you know how often does it crash when i am under difficult conditions like i'm riding a bike at 25 miles an hour and my and it's 20 degrees outside and i and i'm using google maps to find out where i'm going this phone allows me to know where i'm going and keep giving me directions this one crashes every two minutes into that condition if i'm let's say you know i put the phone down and i walk over to the other side of the kitchen this phone allows me to continue listening to my music this one has the because the bluetooth range on it is considerably worse and this is the kind of stuff that i notice when i go over when i use my devices and the reason that i'm using a 140 dollar phone is because it's not just because i'm a cheapskate it's also because in many ways the 140 dollar phone also there's cool [ __ ] like this look at this see i could turn on my flashlight by doing this that's [ __ ] awesome can't do the the only time ever gonna do that with this is when i throw it at the [ __ ] wall because it it turns off again but the thing that's awesome about this is the general feel of using the device is what i care about you know like does it does it do annoying stuff does it crash on me is it reliable and all that and what i find is that this moto g that costs under 200 retail is has been one of the few phones that just hits it for me out of the park as opposed to many flagship models that often are just a little bit more finicky so i wanted to try this just for the hell of it because i wanted to see what a more flagship fancy schmancy phone felt like and this is going back because it's just yeah i know they make new ones i know why didn't you try the latest generation why didn't you try a newer one bloody blahdy blah i had the samsung s i had the samsung galaxy s4 g when the s3 came out people said oh you should try that no they fixed everything i got it sucked i then the s5 came out i got it sucked they said oh no no with the s7 is so much i got the s7 it ran it would it would freeze it would it would run slow would do stupid [ __ ] it's like you know you fooled me four times no i'm done and based on when this phone came out when it cost it should be considered better than this but this represents a really great value and i don't think that people should feel bad if they're unable to afford a high-end phone a high-end cell phone to use as their smartphone because you really do get more than you think you're getting when you buy the cheapest motorola phone there is and i remember when i went into the verizon store to get this i usually buy my phones he used to refurbish for the most part i had to buy this one new because i needed something immediately i felt a little guilty about it i usually prefer to buy them used or refurbished i went to the store and i asked if they had a moto and they handed me the 999 dollar one and i asked about the moto g and they said we don't have that one on display and i said i didn't ask if you had it on display i asked if you had it in stock do you have it in stock and then he's like he sighs and then he br he opens a drawer he finds it and he gives it to me so when you go to the verizon store very often you won't even see this phone you won't know that this is available unless you do your research but you should do your research because when you go to the store they're going to push you into the most expensive phone there is and a lot of people can't really afford the most expensive thing there is right now and what you get for what you pay for with one of these it's absolutely amazing and again i just i love being able to do that and get my flashlight it's so cool everybody else oh let me use my fingerprint let me scroll down let me scroll down again let me get flashlight [ __ ] look what i can do awesome show off on your first date show off at parties it's amazing show off to your girlfriend's parents and your first meet them look what i can do eh all right probably understand at this point why i don't do reviews because i kind of suck at them anyway that's it for today as always hope you learned something see you all in the next video and after this i imagine nobody is going to ask me to do another review of consumer products because yeah there's a reason that the the marquez brownies and the linuses of the world do these things

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 452,154

Rating: 4.9186344 out of 5

Keywords: motorola, android, moto g, samsung, samsung S9+

Id: CkEV4sZQFzk

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/memory_of_a_high]

Louis speaks to my soul in this video.

The bezel and the ergonomics of phone use drives me nuts.

[u/uselubewithcondoms]

This brought me joy. (:

[u/nicktheflick]

I do disagree on some points but the premise is solid

[u/Shahid_2008]

Great video