Join the discussion: What's the worst phone you've ever owned?

Nexus S 4G

Super laggy and slow. Every phone before and since has been 100 times smoother and 100 times more responsive.

HTC Shadow. It was the best looking phone i ever owned, that copper/brown color was awesome. It was put together well and the slide out keyboard felt great.

But, Windows OS was a complete pile of sh%t. No apps really ever came over. The OS was hard to navigate. Never felt like anything was scaled right on the screen.

Motorola CLIQ. It was the second Android phone on T-Mobile and I got it after my T-Mobile G1 was stolen. It was a cool form factor with a slide out keyboard, but the software was terrible. Battery life was non-existent. Camera was so bad I never even used it. I switched to a Blackberry after that and kept it for 2 years.

My first smartphone (the Xperia Ray) ran on Gingerbread, and it was working fine. Actually, when I upgraded it to KitKat, things became so messy and unstable that I rooted it and, after a couple of days of tinkering with different ROMs, went back to Gingerbread.

Alcatel OneTouch Hero 2. That thing ran hot for no apparent reason, it would lose battery just because you looked at it funny, and it came with a capacitive stylus (parading as a Galaxy Note competitor), which was only fun to use if you wanted to see how terribly wrong it reproduces your writing. The screen was so yellow that I think the RGB matrix was missing some B pixels.

So you bypassed Ice Cream Sandwich & Jelly Bean forwards and backwards? Funny. Not funny ha ha, but funny weird. ?

LG optimus 3D (performance), LG G5 (Overheating and burn in screen, lg g6 (burn in screen)

That's a tricky one...

The Galaxy Young (my first modern smartphone) must've been the most sluggish one but that's understandable given the price and the state of budget phones at the time.

The Galaxy A5 (2016) was great until it suddenly decided to heat up to a point of no return. I had to leave it outside as I was worried it'll blow up (it didn't but I decided to play it safe by getting rid of it). No such issues with the Galaxy S23 Ultra. ?

Although smartphones are slowly approaching the ceiling of what's possible today, the exciting bit is that you can hardly go wrong with any brand/model. A 2016 mid-range phone came with a fair number of red lights, which isn't the case in 2023. The next step is to make great budget phones more accessible. A large portion of the population in developing countries don't own a smartphone in the first place.

Oh, I remember the Optimus 3D; it made things to my stomach. Good thing that the hype around 3D dried out very quickly...

Not surprised to hear that. I guess the ribbon cable failed at some point after a few thousand slide-outs of the keyboard. I actually tried repairing it myself, but unknowingly bought a Sprint version of the spare part (cable + PCB) instead of a T-Mobile one. (Remember when different carriers had different versions of the same phone?) It fixed the screen, but then the earpiece stopped working. Again, fun times :)