Sony Xperia XA2 (2020)
Selection

My existing Samsung Galaxy S5 (2015) is now five years old and it's showing its age. Plus it's in a time warp, updatewise. Now is the time to replace it.

Timeline of my pocket computers:

Table of Contents

• Selection Criteria
• Kernel Versions in LineageOS Images
• Phones That I Might Actually Buy
• Feature Matrix
• Press and Customer Reviews
• Reviews for the Moto G7 River
• Reviews for the Sony Xperia XA2 Pioneer
• Amazon Customer Reviews for the Sony Xperia XA2 Pioneer
• Conclusion

Selection Criteria

This time around, my selection criteria for the new pocket computer are (in approximate order of importance):

• The machine must have a CyanogenMod version available. I'm not going to deal with vendor hacks of doubtful security, nor with usage restrictions that I can't bypass. The legal issues with the name CyanogenMod are discussed later.

• Unless something really nasty turns up, I'm going to insist on the possibiity of kernel updates. The Galaxy S5 is on kernel 3.1.7 (3.1.x was maintained 2011-10-xx to 2012-01-xx), while 5.5.1 (on my laptop Xena) is the latest (2020-01-26). This is not acceptable. My criterion is going to be that an image is available with a kernel no more than 6 months old, which at this date would be kernel version 5.2.x. Update: the modern paradigm for cellphones is that they pick the most recent kernel with long term support (LTS), and never change the underlying version. But with CyanogenMod, LTS releases with relatively recently backported security patches are available, and that's what I'm going to have to accept.

• The carrier continues to be T-Mobile (GSM) in the USA. A phone that could do both GSM and CDMA would be rated highly, but of these two, GSM is more important to me, for use when travelling. GSM is widely available both abroad and in the USA. 4G LTE is widely available in urban areas, plus some rural areas, and at present all credible phones can handle it. 5G is appearing gradually, and I would probably choose a phone that can do 5G if it meets my other criteria, but most of these criteria take priority over 5G, so I might well sacrifice 5G capability.

• The pocket computer must be unlocked, referring to the ability to flash arbitrary software (vs. sabotaging operation with other carriers). I will be putting non-vendor software on it, and I've had unpleasant prior experience jailbreaking locked phones.

• I view HTML content a lot. The phone must have a nice display. It looks like modern phones are 130mm diagonal and 1920x1080px, which is total overkill.

• At times I use the hand computer outdoors in direct sunlight, particularly for map navigation. It is quite important that the display be readable in that situation, even though its color and contrast may be degraded from its performance in artificial light. A transflective display (color) would be rated highly if available; so would flight capability of pigs. The OLED display on the Galaxy S5 has been satisfactory but not wonderful, in sunlight.

• Starting with the Galaxy S3 I switched to an on-screen keyboard, and this choice has worked out, so once again I will not look for the physical keyboard that the G1 and the Droid 3 had. Is there any phone these days that has a physical keyboard? In the past I've used successfully a folding Bluetooth keyboard for extensive data entry, and recently I wrote a HTML document of about 90K words (average 6 bytes/word counting separating blanks) using a flat text editor and the on-screen keyboard.

• I would like fairly long battery life, but assessing the battery life before purchase is hard, and published data often is on tests that don't match my (or any live user's) usage pattern, so the life actually achieved is substantially less than the product hype. Formerly I insisted on a field-replaceable battery; however, with the Galaxy S5 I've found that an external power bank has worked well for keeping me entertained on a long flight. Also, batteries last a lot longer these days than in 2008 when I had the Droid-3; in five years the S5's battery has lost about one third of its capacity. In the unlikely event that the new phone also lasts five years, I'm willing to do a professional battery replacement.

• The Galaxy S5 has a slot for a user-provided SD card; however, the Android permission system made it very hard for me to put anything useful on this card. I would still like a card slot on the new pocket computer.

• Like most people, I have converted to using the pocket computer for photography rather than a dedicated camera, and I would like a decent camera. The F number, sensor pixel count, and focal length (physical size) are the key dimensions here. Optical zoom would be very nice but I'm not likely to get this. In product reviews the author's nitpicks usually refer to issues, like overall image brightness or color balance, that are controlled by the vendor-provided camera program and they aren't judging the camera itself.

• Here is a list of features that are important, and that every modern cellphone is expected to have.

  • Wired headphones and Bluetooth A2DP are required for music listening. Every phone should have both. A 3.5mm stereo jack is preferred over a proprietary jobbie like on the HTC Dream.

  • I rely on the pocket computer for navigation and mapping. It must have a GPS receiver for this activity. All modern phones have GPS.

  • Photography with a rear-facing camera. Massive resolution is not needed; it's impossible for a cellphone to have optics to match the sensors that go into cellphones these days. Auto focus is important for jobs like reading barcodes, which is one of my major uses of the rear-facing camera. LED flash is a nice addition.

  • USB connection to the host computer, including Android debugging. All Android phones have this. File transfer without unmounting the SD card is desirable, but this is an OS issue.

  • Charges from a generic micro-USB or mini-USB connector, not a vendor-specific charger like Nokia's old 1.5mm cylinder connector. This is a Chinese commerce department requirement and even modern Nokia phones charge through USB. Today's phones have a USB type C connector and can negotiate high voltage with a cooperating charger, translating into fast charging.

• Here is a laundry list of features which would be nice but are not deal-breakers if absent. They are ordered by importance.

  • Water and rain resistance. The Galaxy S5 has IP67 (Intrusion Protection): essentially no ingress of fingers, tools or dust, and immersion 1 meter under (non-salt) water for 30 minutes. While flagship phones tend to make the IP rating a point of competition, not all phones are water resistant. I hope that the phone I get will have a good IP rating like the Galaxy S5.

  • Adjusts the screen brightness according to the ambient light level. The Galaxy S5 does this very nicely, and it saves battery while keeping the display readable as lighting changes.

  • Video chat with a front-facing camera.

A lot of pocket computer activities depend more on operating system support than on hardware components. However, the point here is to pick the hardware. But we need to keep aware whether the operating system uses that hardware effectively.

Kernel Versions in LineageOS Images

First, what's happened to CyanogenMod? Cyanogen (the lead developer), after a period of close relation with Samsung, made a deal with whoever makes the One-Plus to use CyanogenMod as the standard distro on their phones. But something bad happened, and they got divorced, with One-Plus retaining the right to CyanogenMod's name. In the mad scramble after that collapse, Cyanogen and the development team came up with LineageOS (Wikipedia article about it). Not the name I would have chosen: wouldn't WebScorpion or Boomslang be a better name for a killer OS image? Anyway, that's not really my business.

In forum posts the acronym LOS is sometimes used for LineageOS.

Web resources:

• LineageOS Website (https://lineageos.org/).
• List of Supported Devices

There are 126 supported devices (currently in early 2020) plus 143 devices with unmaintained (discontinued) images that could even so be downloaded. I've got to automate the process of detecting those with recent kernels.

The mapping from versions to maintenance date ranges may be found in the Wikipedia article Linux kernel version history. Here is the distribution of kernel versions.

• 25 use kernel 3.4.x (LTS maintenance 2012-05 to 2016-10)
• 13 use 3.10.x (LTS maintenance 2013-08 to 2017-11)
• 9 use 3.18.x (LTS maintenance 2014-12 to 2017-01)
• 5 use 4.4.x (LTS maintenance 2016-01 to 2022-02, SLS until 2026 or possibly 2036)
• 2 use 4.9.x (LTS maintenance 2016-12 to 2023-01)
• 72 could not be unpacked by the program.

It appears that the paradigm in cellphone kernels is to pick a LTS (long term support) release and never change it, whereas desktop distros update their kernels on a regular schedule plus upon security bugfix releases. My hope of finding a phone with a more desktop-like kernel update policy does not seem to be working out.

What are the currently known phones with the two most recent kernels, only 4 years old, compared to 8 years for my Samsung Galaxy S5? The dates are when Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of these particular LTS updates; note that these are relatively recent. Quickly scanning the changelogs, I notice that contemporaneously relevant issues were being addressed, i.e. backported, such as the Spectre branch prediction side channel exploit.

• BQ bardock (Aquaris X), 4.9.191 (2019-09-06)
• BQ bardockpro (Aquaris X Pro, 4.9.191 (2019-09-06)
• BQ zangyapro (Aquaris X2 Pro, unknown version
• Asus X00TD (Zenfone Max Pro M1), 4.4.194 (2019-09-21)
• Asus X01BD (Zenfone Max Pro M2), 4.4.194 (2019-09-21)
• OnePlus cheeseburger (OnePlus 5), 4.4.153 (2018-08-28)
• OnePlus dumpling (OnePlus 5T), 4.4.153 (2018-08-28)
• OnePlus fajita (OnePlus 6T), unknown version
• Xiaomi sagit (Mi 6), 4.4.189 (2019-08-11)
• Xiaomi dipper (Mi 8), unknown version

How much work should I put into adding to the ability of my unpacker program to determine the kernel versions of the 72 unknown phones? It looks like all of the vendors with recent kernels have newer models with unknown kernel versions. The major vendors are not represented (i.e. are represented with older models and older kernels). Probably there has been a change in the manner of packing the boot image, which my program does not know about. But how much is the selection still going to be driven by recency of the underlying kernel (version number) versus LTS and inclusion of backported patches? I think it's prudent to determine the kernel version numbers (and LTS release dates) of more major vendors, and specifically to find out why their offerings were not unpacked by my program.

Phones That I Might Actually Buy

Here's a list of targeted models, with these selection criteria: picking the most recent (having CyanogenMod support) of each vendor's product line; excluding vendors that I know little about or have had a bad experience with or which are blacklisted for security violations in other product lines. They are sorted by attractiveness with a very limited look at specs and availability. None is the vendor's latest product; it takes time to get CyanogenMod running on a new phone. Chassis names are capitalized (if words) whereas download dirnames and basenames are lower case.

• Motorola River (Moto G7) -- Inception 2019-02-07. Motorola Mobility is a subsidiary of Lenovo. $200 sold by Amazon.
• Sony Pioneer (Xperia XA2) -- Inception 2018-01-08. $315 (and up) from Amazon outside vendors.
• LG d851 (G3 T-Mobile) -- Inception 2014-05-28. $230 from Amazon outside vendor.
• Samsung a5y17lte (Galaxy A5 2017) -- Inception 2017-01-02. On Amazon, refurbished only.
• Samsung kccat6 (Galaxy S5 Plus, SM-G901F) -- Inception 2014-08-xx, not on Amazon.
• HTC m8 (One M8) -- probably discontinued, same vintage as Galaxy S5.
• Google Sailfish (Pixel, original) -- discontinued by Google.

Obviously only the first three are viable, and the Motorola River (Moto G7) has obvious advantages over the others. (One of CyanogenMod's missions is to bring recent AOSP images to older phones, no longer supported by their vendors or carriers, like the ones I'm excluding at this step.) The way forward is clear: do the research to unpack the images for these, and determine the kernel version. Prepare a comparison table of features. Assuming that the River wins on features, find review articles and look for gotcha's that I'll need to work around.

Steps in discovering version numbers:

• The image file is still a zip file. unzip -lv $chassis-signed.zip to list contents, which are:

  • META-INF/com/android/metadata -- various info about the payload.
  • care_map.txt -- Bunch of decimal numbers, not clear what it is.
  • compatibility.zip -- 4 XML files which may be lists of contents.
  • payload.bin -- 622Mb of payload.
  • payload_properties.txt -- Sizes and checksums using a non-obvious algo, 148 bits (?), not SHA-1.
  • META-INF/com/android/otacert -- Trust anchor (self-signed cert) of LineageOS.

• payload.bin is not in any recognized format, and strings does not reveal uncompressed structure that could be pulled apart.

• How to Extract Android OTA Payload.bin File using Payload Dumper by Dhanajay (2019-10-17 in thecustomdroid). Use Payload Dumper by Gregory Montoir, written in Python, works on Linux. Link from that article: payload_dumper.zip. This is actually HTML; follow the download link on the page, and read README.md once you get it unzipped. It is not a simple command line tool like unzip is; the unpacked result ends up in a directory output in the same dir that the script is in. You end up with a boot.img file on which you can run abootimg.

• Results:

  • River: 4.9.203-perf+ .
  • Pioneer 4.4.153 ; it includes 3.0Gb system, 0.9Gb vendor compressed packages, oink.
  • d851: still can't unpack it, and since it's six years old since inception, I'm not going to put any more work into it.

Feature Matrix

Most of this information is from the LineageOS Devices List. In the feature column, numbers in parens refer to notes at the end indicating other sources of information.

• 1. Prices are current (2020-02-14) on Amazon; "AZ" means sold by Amazon, "OV" means by Amazon affiliate (outside vendor).
• 2. The kernel version numbers were discovered by jimc, by unpacking LineageOS images.
• 3. The mass and camera specs come from the product pages.
• 4. Online docs say the Pioneer does not do 802.11ac, but the Startup Guide says that it does have it. Confirmed, this phone (model H3123) is talking to my 5GHz access point.
• 5. The delivered phone was GSM only, excluding Verizon and other CDMA carriers.
• 6. Abbreviations in the Other item:
  • Finger — A fingerprint reader for authentication
  • Accel — Accelerometer, to tell which side of the phone is up
  • Compass — To tell which way the user is facing
  • Gyro — Gyroscope, to tell when the phone (and user) changes direction or is in motion
  • Prox — Proximity sensor, to shut off the display when the phone is close to the user's face, like during a voice call
  • HallEf — Hall Effect magnetometer, for the compass
  • Light — Ambient light sensor, to make the display brighter or dimmer
  • GPS — Global Positioning System receiver, for accurate locations
  • FM-Radio — For playing music etc. without using the Internet
  • NFC — Near Field Communication, used in store payment systems and phone to phone data links

Frequency bands (MHz) supported by the phones. For all, 2G means GSM, 3G means HSPA, 4G means LTE, for which individual bands are listed. While documentation is not very explicit, USA models of both the River and the Pioneer are advertised for all USA carriers, i.e. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and virtual carriers. This means they do both GSM and CDMA. The international models are GSM only. None of these phones support 5G. Update: there's a sticker on the Pioneer's box saying Only GSM! Note: phone does not work on Verizon… or any CDMA carrier, only GSM carriers. Please return phone without opening the box, thanks.

See this Wikipedia article about E-UTRA, which is the formal acronym for LTE. It has links to various tables, specifically deployments by region. In particular, here is a table mapping supported LTE bands to regions where they are likely to work for roaming. Europe (ITU region 1) includes Africa; America (ITU region 2) includes both North and South; and Asia (ITU region 3) includes Australia and India. The River and Pioneer support all the bands listed here except 4 and 17; the LG G3 supported bands are noted.

• Band 17 (700MHz) in North America and a few Caribbean nations, only on LG G3
• Band 20 (800MHz) in Europe
• Band 5 (850MHz) in America and Asia, not all nations have it
• Band 4 (1700MHz) in America only, only on LG G3
• Band 3 (1800MHz) in Europe, Asia, Brazil
• Band 2 (1900MHz) in America only
• Band 1 (2100MHz) in Europe, Asia, Brazil
• Band 7 (2600MHz) in all regions, on all 3 phones.

Comparing the candidates on features:

• The River is last year's model, almost exactly 1 year since inception. The Pioneer is two years back version. The LG G3 is 5.5 years old, only a year or two newer than the phone I'm replacing. Being recent is important.
• Prices are surprisingly low, much lower than the current models.
• CPU, GPU, RAM, flash, SD card are all plenty, I think way more than I actually need.
• The displays all look excellent. The River's display seems to extend over the area that on others is occupied by buttons, which is the style these days.
• Communication is equivalent for all, except the Pioneer surprisingly lacks 802.11ac, which is not a big problem for me. Update: the Pioneer is talking to my 802.11ac (5GHz) access point. Update: the River lacks NFC (near field communication, for digital payment). That's a real problem for me.
• Cameras are steroidal.
• The River is 157mm long compared to 142mm for the Galaxy S5. Good thing I measured: I would need a new belt pouch. The other phones will fit in the existing pouch. The Pioneer is almost exactly the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S5 which I'm replacing.
• The River and Pioneer have a mass of 172g and 171g, vs. 145g for the Galaxy S5. Possibly more physical size of the battery? The Motorola Droid 3 weighed 184g and it was reasonable for me. I'm giving these phones a pass on the mass issue.
• The 3.0Ah or 3.3Ah battery is a significant step up from what I have, and I also hope for more aggressive power saving in the new hardware and software.
• Kernel version 4.9.x is the newest found in (successfully unpacked) CyanogenMod images.

The main conclusion from the feature comparison is, on most aspects the phones are generally equivalent. But newness is important and the River leads here while the LG G3 is ancient. One disappointment is in intrusion protection: while the old Samsung Galaxy S5 has IP67, none of the current candidates is IP rated. I'm going to read reviews on the River, and come back to the Pioneer only if something really nasty turns up for the River. Which it did: no NFC.

Press and Customer Reviews

Reviews for the Moto G7 River

Motorola Moto G7 review by Patrick Holland on CNET (2019-04-12)

The author likes the design, display, dual (?) rear cameras, turbo charging, good battery life. He doesn't like the speaker. Low-light photos and general video quality aren't fantastic. The Moto G7 is the best budget phone we've tried, hands down.

Apparently the MSRP at inception was around $300 ($230 at Walmart). It has Gorilla Glass front and back, which tends to attract fingerprints. The display goes right up to the top of the chassis except for a notch for the front camera. The display has rounded corners, and some apps are seen to act weird in dealing with them. The fingerprint reader is on the back. It has a headphone jack. The speaker is on the bottom, which is serviceable but often sounded tinny. Intrusion protection: IP54 (how come jimc didn't see this on the product page? Because it isn't there.)

The author devotes several paragraphs to a demo that the camera app is the main culprit in determining how good the photos are. He has a pair of photos of his sleeping cat, taken with the stock app and the one off the Google Pixel 2, stacked with a sliding window to show a fraction of each. The stock app tends to over brighten the picture, particularly white parts of the fur, while the Google app maintains dynamic range, and avoids over-sharpening the fine detail of the fur.

Playing looped video in airplane mode, the Moto G7 lasted almost 13 hours.

Flagship phones like the current iPhone model can outperform the Moto G7, but the Moto G7 comes very close to their level.

Motorola Moto G7 Review by Steven Winkelman on PC Magazine (2019-03-14)

Pro: solid performance, long battery life, supports all US carriers, attractive design. Cons: disappointing camera quality, mediocre call quality, relatively pricey so he says. It's a Gorilla Glass shell with an aluminum frame; he says it feels good in his hand. The display is bright enough to use in direct sunlight. On top is a hybrid SIM / micro-SD slot. (See jimc's note for the Pioneer.) On the bottom is the speaker (82dB, loud), a USB-C port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Testing cellular data on T-Mobile in Manhattan (heavily congested): he got speeds of 22Mbps down and 17Mbps up, similar to other midrange phones tested. He says NFC is missing. (Didn't jimc see this on the product page? It's there, but with the word No.)

He was pleasantly surprised by the Moto G7's performance. No problems with 12 apps open simultaneously. Playing a game for an hour used 14% battery. Streaming video over Wi-Fi at full brightness: the battery lasted just under 10 hour. He didn't like the camera.

Motorola Moto G7 and G7 Power review: still the budget phones to beat by Chris Welch on The Verge (2019-04-10)

This review was generally similar to the other two.

We've got a problem: the River does not have NFC, making Google Pay impossible. The UK version may or may not have it, but we're not in the UK. I'm going to have to use the contingency plan and read reviews of the Sony Xperia XA2 Pioneer.

Reviews for the Sony Xperia XA2 Pioneer

Sony Xperia XA2 review by GSMArena Team (2018-01-26)

Basics: Body: Aluminum frame, polycarbonate back; colors silver, black. blue (cyan actually), pink. Extra info on hardware: Rear camera: steroidal 23Mpx, 1/2.3in (11mm I hope) sensor size, f/2.0, 25mm equivalent focal length. Connectivity list: Single/dual SIM (Jimc discovered: some models, but not this one, have dual SIM sockets. Both are nano size. The second one is placed sideways in the SD slot, so you can insert a SIM or a SD card but not both. The River has a hybrid SIM/SD slot but I haven't confirmed how similar it might be.) LTE category 12/13 (600Mbps download, with tailwind), USB-C, Wi-Fi abgn not ac, GPS, NFC, Bluetooth 5.x, FM radio. Fingerprint reader on the back. Single speaker on the bottom. 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. Physical camera activation key. In the box: phone, USB-C cable, generic 1.5A charger.

They like how it feels in the hand: yes plastic, but comfortable. The black version may show fingerprints, though. Good backlit IPS display, equal number of sub-pixels for each of RGB (unlike an earlier phone with weird pixel layout). 500nit brightness (is this in the spec page?); they measured 530nit. Contrast ratio at least 1300:1. Visibility in sunlight is average, OLED is better; quantitative contrast ratio is 3.765 (best of IPS competitors) vs. Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) (OLED) at 3.804. The out-of-box color balance was not to his liking, biased toward cyan, i.e. minus red, but this is tweakable.

GSMArena's battery test: 21.3hr voice chat (3G), or 13.2hr web browsing, or 11.5hr video playback. If combined with an hour per day of each task and 21 hours of standby, it would scale to 92hr. This is pretty good, for them.

Speaker: voice chat on speakerphone (presumably turned to loudest) is 69dB, music 73dB, ringer 78dB. Rated Very Good.

For the rear camera, they praise the provided app, and don't complain about picture quality like the reviewers of the River. They do, however, say that the front camera lacks autofocus (which the XA1 had) and so is not as sharp.

Overall they think the Pioneer definitely deserves a recommendation.

Sony Xperia XA2 review By Dominic Preston on TechAdvisor (2018-07-16)

It offers solid specs and performance for the price, but the 16:9 screen and chunky body are already out of step with the competition, and the camera just can't keep up at all. In other words, it does a cellphone's job well, but fails to follow styling trends. I want to see the details of what he's complaining about on the camera. MSRP appears to be $500 at the time of review.

He praises the camera hardware, but pins the blame for underwhelming camera performance on the stock camera app. Note the different judgments about the software between this review and the one from GSMArena.

Battery life: he doesn't get too quantitative, but he reports 8.5hr on Geekbench's battery life test, which is better than a typical flagshop phone (from 2018) can do, he says. It comfortably runs longer than one day, but not two days.

Amazon Customer Reviews for the Sony Xperia XA2 Pioneer

Watch out, searches will return the Xperia XA2 Ultra (wrong phone), and refurbished ones. Also the color radically affects the price. These reviews are from the product page for the Sony Xperia XA2 Factory Unlocked Phone - 5.2" Screen - 32GB - Silver (U.S. Warranty). $315, sold by Aimportar USA, fulfilled by Amazon. Condition: New. ($500 if you want black, from a different vendor.)

Customer reviews distribution: 55% 5 star, 17% 4 star, 7% 3 star, 8% 2 star, 15% 1 star, 310 total reviews. In this I'm going to read recent reviews first, and I'll concentrate on negative ones to try to get advance warning of problems. They separate USA and international reviews (Canada is international), and I'm going to narrow down my work by looking at USA reviews (199 of them). I'll exclude 4* and 5* reviews since I already know the phone is wonderful:-) Here are summaries of the most useful negative reviews (and one positive):

• Steve (2018-06-19, 5*) gave the top good review: super happy, looks so sleek, etc etc. Update 1.5yr later: This is the best phone bar none! Still running like the first day. A lot of bumps, scrapes and scratches on the metal bezel but the glass screen is pristine. No need for a case. Battery lasts for days running LineageOS. (jimc says: he is the only one that I read that mentioned LineageOS.)
• Princess (2018-11-05, 1*) gives the top negative review: If you're on a budget… it's a good phone. But its super thick. The screen scratches extremely easy. 23Mpx camera is too much; you can't focus it, it's blurry. (jimc says: likely she's got autofocus turned off and doesn't know how to turn it back on.)
• SteveInSac (2019-02-19, 3*): Google Pay (NFC) works well. Fingerprint sensor worked great the first few days but now is finicky. He also had trouble with cell and Wi-Fi connectivity, 3 bars LTE and the phone complains no Internet even with Wi-Fi connected. (jimc says: this tidbit says to me that the finger of blame doesn't point to the radio firmware nor Wi-Fi, but a bug in net management, probably DNS. He has Oreo and is hoping it will be fixed in a future update.) Deal killer: the phone app ignores the proximity sensor and he ends up opening random apps with his ear.
• Tony (2018-05-25, 3*): Great camera and never crashes. Phone works good in general but after 4-5 weeks it has a big yellow spot on the screen. (jimc says: Outage in the blue channel. Get the screen replaced under warranty. Other reviewers complain bitterly about warranty support, specifically for screen replacements.)
• Eric Hofmann (2018-05-08, 3*): lots of positives, but prior Xperia products have been water and dust resistant and he's unhappy that this one is unrated.
• Robert (2019-05-02, 2*): After 9 or more months of use, 90% of the time the phone makes him happy, but the camera is awful, the print reader doesn't work some of the time, and the brightness is on a log scale. The screen comes on when he thinks it should stay off. The biggest weakness is that it will frequently drop off the T-Mobile network, bars drop to zero. (jimc says: defective radio? Would it help to re-flash the radio software?)
• Jessica Gunnoe (2018-10-19, 2*): The OS takes up all but 10% of the memory. (jimc says: the CyanogenMod image is 3.0Gb vs under 0.5Gb for all the other ones I disassembled. I should de-install a lot of the bloatware they apparently give you. Also, this is evidence that the CyanogenMod image includes a lot of software that others don't have, presumably from the stock image.) (A different image was 0.6Gb; what's going on here? I should pay close attention to file sizes in the image I eventually use.)
• The 1* reviews have a mix of infant mortality, wacked setup, and possible OS bugs, Surprisingly few reviewers were obviously clueless.

Conclusion

I purchased the Pioneer.