Hi all. I’m in the market for a new Android phone and I was hoping you could help with recommendations.

Thanks to my awesome friend cancer (and its awesome friends at Phillip Morris), I had my larynx removed and can no longer speak. Because of that, I use my phone as my main form of communication, typing out things and showing my phone to people. It’s in my hand all the time and it’s VERY important to me.

Thanks to some of the side effects of the drugs that are keeping me alive, I am very sensitive to heat. My phone (Oneplus 7T) gets hot when I’m gaming, most phones do, and it can occasionally get too uncomfortable for me to use. It doesn’t happen often though. My wife’s Pixel Fold, on the other hand, gets too hot just from normal use. I’ve read this is a thing with the newer Pixel phones.

So the most important criterion right now is that it can’t get too hot. Even when charging.

Second most important criterion is weight, since I’m constantly holding it and showing it to people… Or just sitting in bed texting. The Pixel Fold is cool and all, but too damn heavy to be lugging around everywhere.

Third would be size. With the amount I type, a bigger screen means bigger buttons and fewer typos. I know that bigger tends to mean heavier so there’s a balance to be struck between this priority and the previous one. One of the reasons I’m looking for help.

Last, I tend to prefer a close-to-stock Android experience. But given the importance of my other priorities, this is lower on the list.

Some other info: I live in the US, I’m on T-Mo currently but I only buy unlocked phones, price is obviously a consideration but not a constraint, don’t care about camera, nice screen and high refresh would be nice to have.

Thanks in advance for any help. It’s such a pain to try to sift through all the phones every few years. I used to just pick the newest Nexus. Then the newest Oneplus. But Google and Oneplus aren’t what they used to be and so I’m open to suggestions now. Thanks!

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Thx for the recommendation, I’ll look into that one. I haven’t had a Samsung phone since the Galaxy S2; I know people like them but they’ve always felt really overpriced to me. But given my kinda specific requirements, might be worth the premium.

    For text to speech, I’m just using the Android built-in accessibility screen reader. It puts a little button on the bottom by the tile button and I can use it to read anything on the screen. Kinda sucks that I can’t change the voice to a male one, but I’m used to it at this point.