5 Worst Android Smartphones Of All Time: Ever Used One Of These?
We always like to talk about the best Android phones and the greener side of the grass, but there’s no secret that there’s been a few stinkers over the years. While the amount of disappointing Android devices have significantly declined within the past couple of years, there are still one or two coming out each year that make us scratch our heads and let out a huge disappointment. Lets look at the 5 worst android smartphones of all time.
5) HTC Thunderbolt
The Thunderbolt was woefully under-powered, running basically the same hardware as the EVO 4G that came out the previous year. The device itself was larger to accommodate the dedicated LTE modem, but the battery was only 1400mAh—even smaller than the EVO’s cell.
The result was abysmal battery life when LTE was active, which it always was. Verizon didn’t include any way to disable the LTE radio.
4) Motorola Backflip
The Backflip had a backward-folding keyboard that was exposed on the rear of the phone when it was closed. It was just as uncomfortable to use as you’d imagine. The software wasn’t any better, either.
The one thing that takes the Backflip from just bad to one of the worst is the way search was handled. The main reason to include it in 5 worst android smartphones of all time is that there was no Google search on this phone—AT&T and Motorola made Yahoo the exclusive search provider on the Backflip. Google doesn’t allow OEMs to do that anymore, thankfully.
3) HTC First
The HTC First was under-powered and had a dingy display. Its 5MP rear camera was also of extremely poor quality, which was especially weird seeing as Facebook is so into people sharing photos. The Facebook Home interface proved to be confusing and buggy as well.
The main problem was that the HTC First used social content from your Facebook account everywhere. Most of us have friends who post dumb stuff, and that meant you’d see dumb stuff every time you picked up the phone. In the promo images, everyone was posting amazing photos and having meaningful conversations. That’s probably not what your feed is like.
Read Also: Facebook Rolls Out AI To Detect Suicidal Posts: Software To Save Lives
2) Asus Garminfone
This phone had the already-ancient Android 1.6 installed when it launched, but it also ran a version of Garmin’s navigation software on top. The interface was almost entirely geared toward navigation, making for an incredibly awkward experience when you wanted to do anything else. It came with a car mount, but the phone was incredibly thick and unpleasant to hold.
T-Mobile carried the Garminfone in the US, but sales were poor. A price drop from $200 to $130 didn’t help. The phone eventually got an update to Android 2.1, but even that was late. Garmin has not partnered with anyone to produce another phone since.
1) Kyocera Echo
What’s better than one screen? Two screens. This was the rationale for the Kyocera Echo, which was a Sprint exclusive in the US back in 2011. When closed, the phone had a 3.5-inch display, but you could open it to reveal a second 3.5-inch display that snapped into place next to the first one. It was an interesting idea, but the execution was horrible.
Most apps were completely broken when running in “full-screen” mode on both displays. Some apps supported side-by-side mode, but only those modified by Kyocera. There was an SDK for developers to add support for the Echo, but of course, none of them did. The device was not powerful enough to run two apps at the same time, so the feature was largely pointless anyway.
Dishonorable Mention: Samsung Galaxy Note 7
Though not among the 5 worst android smartphones of all time and it wouldn’t be quite right to have the Note 7 in this list, but I should point out this phone was a substantial failure. It just wasn’t the same kind of failure as the above phones. The battery fires make it a definite bungle for Samsung, but other than that it was a very good phone. It’s too bad it had to die. The rest of these devices should never have existed.
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