Top 3 1-YEAR-OLD UNLOCKED Handsets with chipset that will hold up two years down the road?

[Blaeden]

I live in Canada, need to be under a $1,000 and be able to game decent and be tablet-esq in functionality if possible.

 

[J Dubbs]

Any 2 or possibly 3 year old (but brand new) flagship from most brands can be had for half that price or less, and come with a snapdragon fast enough to do anything you want.

 

[Mooncatt]

Any 2 or possibly 3 year old (but brand new) flagship from most brands can be had for half that price or less, and come with a snapdragon fast enough to do anything you want.

Pretty much. Phones are quite powerful these days even in the mid-tier lines. The most common recommendations are Samsung (if you want large fan base support) or Google's Pixel line (if you want the purest Android experience). There's plenty of other brands out there that fill various niche's, even if it's simply to be not one of the masses, so knowing more of what you're wanting would be helpful you narrow things down.

 

[Kizzy Catwoman]

What features matter most apart from chipset? For longest support you need a flagship Samsung or Pixel that will still offer 2 years of updates on a 1 year old phone. A Pixel 4XL may be what you are after. Great cameras, fast chipset and will be supported until 2022. A Samsung S20 FE will also do whatever you have suggested. Plus it will have updates until 2023. It is a more budget version of the S20 line from last year but has the flagship 865 chipset in it.

 

[Blaeden]

Right on, I had a Pixel 2 and do like native Android. Never dug Samsung in the past (cheap plastic casing on the old galaxies) so haven't checked out their recent phones I'll look into it. USAGE -WISE: I do gaming and like being able to sync my Bluetooth keyboard to my phone if I need to type a paper in a pinch. Leaning toward that Pixel 4 XL idea. Cheers mates

 

[Mooncatt]

If you like gaming a lot, there are some gaming marketed phones. The Asus ROG phone line is probably the best known, but there are others. They often offer extra RGB lighting and stereotypical "gamer" styling, faster screen/touch response, extra/active cooling, additional gaming buttons and functionality, headphone jacks, etc. Network compatibility may be questionable because they are a niche class of phones, so you'll need to do your due diligence researching a possible candidate and how compatible it is.

 

[Kizzy Catwoman]

Red magic do a gaming phone, Razer and Audi ROG are the three main players in that market. But the 4XL is a great phone too.

 

[Mooncatt]

Red magic do a gaming phone, Razer and Audi ROG are the three main players in that market. But the 4XL is a great phone too.

I had the Razer Phone 2 for a while, though, questionable if they will release any others. I liked that it was LCD and could run 90HZ instead of 60/120 only because I saw no difference between 90 and 120Hz and it saved the battery some. Speaking of, it was a battery hog. It performed well with everything I threw at it, but I could never be far from an outlet. The UI also wasn't very refined, so many of the seemingly subtle things made it a bit clunky to use. The up side was it was Verizon compatible, with the exception of no Wi-Fi calling that I can remember. Signal strength was much better than the LG phones, so that was an acceptable trade-off for Wi-Fi calling (my area isn't covered the greatest with Verizon). I think I have a more detailed review floating around here on the site, but I wouldn't recommend it if for no other reason than it's an older phone that is no longer officially supported.