Best legacy/older Android hardware in 2025 for rooting, messing around, internet, videos?
Best legacy/older Android hardware in 2025 for rooting, messing around, internet, videos?
Criteria and absurd wishlist
Affordable, might find it used in a shop in the u.s. or from a reputable source online
Full Root
"Secure"
Quality build
Removable battery/sim/storage
Headphone jack
Tablet or phone
Runs something better than Android 7
Sony Xperia 1 series is amazing, fully open bootloader, takes less than a minute to root, no artificial restriction from rooting with AOSP-like ROM, and still have both SD card and headphone jack but still flagship specs of the respective release year of each recent model lol
Ouch, an Xperia 1 IV is a bit pricey, best I can find is about $300. As a comparison, my current Pixel 5 is about $150. (Yea, not comparable phones at all, but for my use-case it doesn't matter).
Nice phone though, thanks for the recommendation - I'm always looking for my next bootloader unlocked phone. Other than being glass backed (which I'm willing to live with, but what's so wrong with plastic!!) the Xperia line looks great.
Yeahhhh that's like one of the biggest downsides of these phones, seriously if Sony price each of them $200 lower they'd be selling like hot cake since they are really all some of the last non-compromising phones if you're also into rooting and OS mods and such.
Alternatively consider to get one of the newer ones and use it as your daily driver for better value, they are all extremely well build and you can easily use them for 4-5 years :p
Especially the gen V model also recently got their first Release of LineageOS for this model! :D
If you're going to use it on the Internet, it should new enough to still be getting security updates.
Motorola G100/Edge S
Atleast here it can be had for under 200€ on the used market.
You need to unlock it via the motorola website. But then its fully rootable. Atleast with the retail unit i purchased.
Buildquality is good. Nothing fancy. Its mostly plastic. But it holds up quite nice after 4 years. The chromed plastic of the frame flaked a bit from my rough handling.
Removable sim and SD-card slot. Battery isnt removable. But its not the worst when it comes to repairability according to teardowns i watched.
But it has a headphone jack!(!!!!)
Runs officially up to android 12. Last time i checked it should get android 15 with lineage.
Security... well there is only so much lineage can do with the official vendor support beeing ended like 2 years ago. But its good enough i guess.
That 21:9 1080p 90hz LCD screen is solid. 500 nits brightness isnt state of the art anymore but its more than useable.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 combined with 8gb RAM is still performing well. If your into emulation it handles most of the consoles well. Even switch and pc emulation apart from the most performance hungry titles.
Cooling isnt the best. Its just a heatpipe from the SOC directly too the battery. SOC will heavily throttle as soon as the battery gets to around 40 degrees C. That nets you around 20-30 minutes of the SOC running at full tilt.
USB 3 5gbs with display out is a really cool feature. Sadly with going custom rom you will loose the great 'ready for' desktop mode from motorola.
Its a bit big and heavy for my taste though. I switched to a smaller device as my daily driver.
All in all its great device for screwing around imho