[DigitalJanitor]

My Samsung Galaxy S5 was fine but of late was starting to heat up, battery life took a nose dive, etc. So... phone shopping. Being annoyed at the ever increasing size of phones these days plus the usual kludge of AT&T bloatware, I decided to go out on a limb and try a Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact- my first foray into unlocked phones. The only major cons I'd note: no headphone jack (bluetooth or use the funky little USB C to headphone port dongle included), and no wireless charging. These are not deal breakers for me but could be for someone else. So far everything has worked a treat without any huge setup ordeals, although obviously I had to do all the work myself piecemeal without having Samsung or AT&T data shuffle apps involved. The guys at the AT&T store were able to trim down my SIM card and AT&T popped right up... the only missing service so far is wireless calling/text although I still may not have found the trick for that. In the US single SIM version there is a space for a SDXC card up to 400Gb in the SIM tray so no worries on space for all those photos and videos. While my phone got small enough to use single handed and fit into any pocket again, the screen size only went from 5.1" on my old Samsung to 5.0" on the Sony and hours of website reading haven't proven to be any kind of problem. With 4Gb of RAM and the latest Snapdragon chipset responsiveness certainly isn't an issue either. I actually just got a second Android update this morning from Sony since I purchased the phone- nice to see that happening frequently (I'm looking at YOU, AT&T ). I've had it for a few weeks now and used it on a backpacking trip from Wednesday night through Sunday (yesterday), all in airplane mode mostly using Gaia, the camera, and Sundroid Pro (handy to see when you have light and when you don't). I did wind up recharging it at some point a few days in using the new 6700mAh version of the Anker Astro E1 brick... between that and charging some action camera batteries we had more than enough juice on everything and 2 lights left on the battery pack, so I'd say it's all a very functional setup. I've also used it on some mountain biking day trips, gotten that elusive just-enough-signal-for-text on top of Taneum ridge, twiddled with the Earthmate app, and paired it with my Inreach without seeing huge battery drain. I'm finally getting the camera's quirks nailed down so... yeah. No complaints.

I think the only real hassle has been finding a case and a screen protector for such an oddball phone here in the US. God bless Amazon.