What was the best and worst phone you ever owned?

[TurtleCrusher]

Best? iPhone 3GS, with my Blackjack 2 coming in right behind it. The 3GS was fast, had many great, innovative apps (when gaming companies were putting out offline-only games with quality), and had a relatively awesome camera.

If the BJ2 had an app store it probably would have taken the cake. A dual core windows smartphone, bluetooth tehtering. This was back when AT&T didn't know what they were doing and classified the BJ2 as a feature phone after the iPhone 3G came out. Unlimited data was $10 a month and I tethered the hell out of it via bluetooth and USB. It was about 150KB a second, which was great compared to nothing, which is what I had lol.

Worst? Kyocera Rise

Besides the keyboard this phone was trash. 1Ghz single core wasn't the Achilles heel, but 512mb ram, 2GB space, no 4G capability even though most other phones had it, and a crummy TN panel made this phone suck. Coming from a 16GB white iPhone 3GS was bad. I should not have switched. Sound was awful, didn't play well with most bluetooth. The android app store was ok at the time, but upgrading to the LG F2 (while it has its own share of problems) was a big relief.

 

[Rubycon]

Note 7 for best (iPhone 7+ replaced it) and for worst Palm Treo 700p from 2006.
That phone was about as stable as a table with three legs. It would reboot in the middle of a call several times a day!

 

[Commodus]

Note 7 for best (iPhone 7+ replaced it) and for worst Palm Treo 700p from 2006.
That phone was about as stable as a table with three legs. It would reboot in the middle of a call several times a day!

I'm now having flashbacks to the Symbian-based Nokia phones I've tried. Didn't matter whether it was an N95 or a later phone like the X7, Symbian would always melt down within a day or two of use. It'd gradually become flakier and flakier until you had no choice but to reboot.

In a sense, it's experiences like yours and mine that explain why Apple and Google ultimately destroyed all their competitors. Many of the pre-iPhone incumbents seemed to think that it was okay for smartphones to have a general level of crappiness, as if instability was somehow an unavoidable part of a smartphone. Turns out that BlackBerry, Microsoft, Nokia and Palm just couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Best without a doubt is my trusty Samsung galaxy note 2 which is now running cyanogenmod CM12.1 on sprint. This is still my primary cell phone and I have no intention of leaving freedompop or swapping it out as I haven't paid a cell phone bill in years. Compared to what I was paying for my note 2 on Verizon this arrangement paid for itself in 36 days. If I do decide to replace it I'll just get a newer note from freedompop and stay cheap on sprint 4g lte.

The worst by far was an old tmobile Motorola T722Iflip phone with a stupid camera attachment that was clumsy at best.

 

[Oyeve]

Best without a doubt is my trusty Samsung galaxy note 2 which is now running cyanogenmod CM12.1 on sprint. This is still my primary cell phone and I have no intention of leaving freedompop or swapping it out as I haven't paid a cell phone bill in years. Compared to what I was paying for my note 2 on Verizon this arrangement paid for itself in 36 days. If I do decide to replace it I'll just get a newer note from freedompop and stay cheap on sprint 4g lte.

The worst by far was an old tmobile Motorola T722Iflip phone with a stupid camera attachment that was clumsy at best.

OMG, that was my first tmo phone. The camera attachment was the worst.

 

[Jake12345]

In my opinion, the best mobile is iPhone 6. iPhone 6 is the first iOS device i have ever used. Its system is really easy to use and very smooth.
The worst mobile is Samsung Galaxy Note undoubtedly. After using some time, maybe two or three years, you would find it become a slow turtle.

 

[smitbret]

Best: Blackberry Bold 9780.

My first "Smart" phone. Battery life for 3 or 4 days of normal use. Gets tossed in the Kiddie Pool or take a dip in a sink full of water? No problem. Dropped on the floor? Bounces back like a champ. Spare parts? Dirt cheap, I could rebuild the entire thing, minus the main board for about $100 and it would look just like brand new. I could buy new bodies out of China for $12-$15 each and a new keyboard was like $7. I replaced the body 3 or 4 times in 4 years cuz of scratches and dings.

Worst: Samsung T939 Behold 2

Just built a little creaky. Didn't do anything well and the battery life was only so-so. The screen was pretty for the time, but that was about it.

 

[THEchasein8tor]

Worst: Asus zenfone 2 ze551ml. even though it appeared to be an appealing buy I soon realized that the quality of materials used felt a bit cheap. The management of the 4gb of ram was alright but could have been better.

Best so far: Asus zenfone zoom Z00XS. The reason I choose this phone as the best one I've used is because I have only owned 2 smartphones so far. The quality is reasonably good and it works well. One minor aspect is it doesn't handle being dropped too well. The circuit ribbon connecting the sim card to the motherboard became lose and with no warranty I had to resort to some good old fashioned hot glue to hold the contacts in place. Also I haven't found any software compatible to root it. As long as you can avoid dropping and not rooting it's a relatively good phone and gets the job done.

 

[MrSquished]

I can't say I've had a best phone that lasted long enough to be considered a best phone. I can't remember one that blew me away although my memory could be failing me.

In a weird way the nexus 6P was both my best and worst phone. For a few months it was amazing. Fast, battery life was killer, best battery life of any phone I've had. Smooth as butter. But then the battery life started sucking and the phone started stuttering and needed restarts. Factory reset it and the problems started happening again shortly. The battery life got so so bad and the phone would shut off showing 20% battery life. I said fuck it and just bought an LG V20.

 

[JimmiG]

Worst: LG Optimus 2X
I bought it as an upgrade from my HTC Desire, which had started randomly rebooting during high load. While it was the "first dual core phone", and CPU performance was snappy, it didn't have enough RAM. The Desire had 576 MB RAM. The Optimus 2X had 512MB, but 128 MB was reserved for the GPU, leaving just 384 MB usable. It was bad enough with Android 2.x, but with the ICS update, it became borderline unusable.

Best was probably the LG G2, which sadly broke due to a cheaply made case, which over time caused the glass to work itself loose from the phone. Very thin bezels (which is probably why the glass came off in the first place), great screen, amazing battery life and good performance.

Quite happy with my current Zenfone 3, too. It's nothing remarkable (Snapdragon 625, 64 GB, 4 GB RAM), but it works reliably, has good battery life and generally does all I need from a phone.

 

[gorcorps]

Hard to say... pretty much every new phone I've had has felt like the best I've used. With the exception of the 6P which was at best a sidegrade from my Note 4, and in some ways a downgrade as it gets older and has more issues.

I'm surprised at how much I dislike the iphone 6 which I have to use for work. The last iphone I had was the iphone 4, which was the last straw before going to Android and never looking back. I remember it being even more polished and easy to use back then. It's like they've kept adding more and more things to it without taking anything else away so it's become bloated and complicated... very different from how they used to be IMO. I guess if I switch over entirely to the iphone for my personal device I'd learn how to use it more effectively, but it just seems more awkward than it used to.

The trend has continued and the galaxy s8 is now the best phone I've ever had. However the jump going from my last phone to this phone feels much greater than previous "best phones" I've had. Some would complain about carrier and/or Samsung bloat, but usually I want to get rid of it because of potential hits to battery life, and my battery life has been so good I haven't noticed anything causing problems. This is the first time I feel like I have everything I need in a phone as is, without any modifications needed requiring root. It's fast, battery life is great, screen is fantastic, and touchwiz looks fine after applying a dark theme.

The only thing that I can't know without just using it, is how all of that will hold up over time. I have my fingers crossed that I'll get a long time out of this one.

 

[clamum]

Best: My current Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Wow what a nice phone (after coming from cheap phones like the Galaxy Centura or Galaxy Proclaim or ZTE Majesty). Before this I had an ASUS Zenphone 2 which was pretty good too.

Worst: My first smartphone, a Windows mobile device in 2009. I don't know the model but it was quite thick by today's standards and it had a slide out full keyboard and came with a stylus. I liked the keyboard and stylus but man that phone locked up and restarted too often for me. Pretty junky, overall, and if I recall I took it to the range at some later point and shot it with my AK.

Favorite: Now it's my S7 Edge. Before this one though it probably was the Samsung Wafter (R510) that I owned back around 2006 for a couple years or maybe even more. Man what a thin ass nice little light phone. I loved this little guy and you could even get Internet on it with a very primitive browser.