Not all phones listed are equally bad though. Nokia Pureview suffered from bad camera quality but I can live with that. What probably is unlivable is exceptionally short battery life, like on the HTC one. Still, an interesting opinion piece, if nothing else.
I had both HTC One's and while the camera on both of them especially the m7 was dire purple durple shite, the battery life was never an issue for me and was when I first started seeing 6hr+ SOT constantly.
Yes but that whole line of a few years also suffered many breaking bugs from HMD like media sound being completely borked in an update and crackling and unusable for literally months before they fixed it. WhatsApp voice messages were hell for 4-5 months.
Or the USB port being so low quality that there were rampant replacements needed after as little as 6 months (my own 7.1 needed 5 replacement USB ports in the 2 years I used it. Never had that from a phone before or after)
Or the short battery life after an update second to only the HTC 10's rapid battery drain bug.
The 2018-2019 HMD years were really rough for software as far as phone usability, plus the bad USB-C part number they continued using during that time.
Otherwise they were decent looking, decent performing, cheaper phones with bad cameras.
It also didnāt help that the phoneās in-display fingerprint sensor was bad. In fact, it was reported that the scanner could be spoofed with chewing gum.
I thought that Cyrcle phone sounded interesting but it appears to have never actually released. They also just used the normal Android UI so all kinds of stuff gets cut off in the corners of the display. So dumb.