Huawei Nexus 6P

Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped? The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap. I'll give Swiftkey another try.

The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera. Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery. There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones

Meanwhile, Google didn’t utilize a similar workaround with their Nexus 6P models (which was their flagship around the similar timeframe as the iOS “batterygate” scandal), as their phones were hitting the same issue. You know what happened? While my friends who had iPhones were sometimes complaining about slowdowns, pretty much everyone I knew who owned a Nexus 6P (including myself) ended up having to deal with the RMA process. Why? Because the phone would just shutdown instantly while at double-digit percentage charge. For me personally, it started with shutting down instantly at 8%. Then it creeped into the 12-15% territory. By the time I felt like I had it enough to deal with it, the phone would just shutdown entirely at 27-29%. The problem initially started around a year after the purchase, and progressed to this awful state in less than half a year. For a lot of people, it would straight up just start hitting a bootloop too, so your phone was entirely toast no matter what. Nexus 6P was an extremely popular “clean android flagship from google” phone at the time (Samsung was not the clear “apple of android” player at yet, but was visibly getting there at a breakneck pace, as they were gearing up for the release of their Galaxy S8 series). Every single person I knew who owned that phone hit that problem within the first 18 months at latest. To Google’s defense, their remediation was (at one specific narrow point in time) to just give people their newer Pixel 1 in exchange fo…