A smartphone is the ultimate, single-user personal computer. Choosing a device is too intimate for me to use any sort of tabular comparison tool. The device needs to be right for me qualitatively also.
I strongly recommend picking a handful of devices and getting a variety of opinions from reviewers. Then, weigh those opinions against what features are most important to you.
If this is your main computer which most likely it is for most people, it's worthwhile to spend some time on selection.
People get so hostile over such things. I have an iPhone for business. I have a Pixel for my personal use. They're alright. It depends on what you need. Still a smartphone enthusiast.
There's a lot of inertia to overcome here. There's advice online everywhere that Android may not the best platform for tablets. As someone who loved the Nexus 7, until you have a large user base that's using the tablets, it's a tougher sell to developers and to users especially that iPads are cheaper now than they have been in the past.
It's an uphill battle. Google has to pay those taxes for doing such a terrible job of getting into the tablet as its own related but different market from mobile.
Is this basically Ubuntu?
They do intentionally hold back packages based on a random value to do gradual rollouts. See below:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1431940/what-are-phased-updates-and-why-does-ubuntu-use-them
Could this be your issue?
Oh, my heart. I remember messaging my now wife with one on Skype. It was so laggy because my phone was super budget but I was amazed what I could do nonetheless.
I can still feel the plastic texture and the delayed vibration following a half second later.
You might be surprised. My father uses a device about that age, but it's a Facebook machine and phone call device. It's fine for the use case if you're not the type to place valuable information on your phone anyways.
I think this is because now the consumer knows what he or she wants. It's hard to build a mobile UI without expectations of consistency.
Back then, Android was more marching to the beat of its own drummer as it were and more dramatically crafting its design language, its visual identify.
I'm curious to see if this will be merely a packaged version of the web page or something more.
One wonders if dropping Play Services support is enough to motivate a user who is already sufficiently determined to use a phone this outdated.
Perhaps you were being sarcastic, but I'm very excited about this feature. I often visit rural areas, and if I got a flat I would love my phone to be useful for letting family know what's going on.
Good news; a true necessity if eSIM is to be consumer friendly.