 With how much it costs to buy a flagship mobile device, I think it's fair to say that most people would like to get a few years out of their phones. Now for iPhone people, that means they're still rocking an iPhone 6 or 6s, both of which are actually still supported on the latest version of iOS. But if you're more into the Android scene, you're probably straight out of luck, as even the more reputable manufacturers only provide feature updates for around two years, and security patches for another one, with the actual follow-through on these promises being reminiscent of an elementary school pinky swear. So, what do you do? Accept that your once flagship phone is now a slow, insecure mess? We say no! So today's video has two main objectives. To see if we can take a five-year-old Android phone, and make it competitive with the experience of an iPhone of the same era, and while we're at it, to investigate if an old flagship at just 50 bucks on eBay could be a viable option if you're looking for a basic smartphone, and you want to save a buck. Speaking of saving a buck, Thermaltake's A500, it's not really about saving a buck, it's just really nice. It's got a modern minimalist design with brushed aluminum panels, and dual hinge swing tempered glass doors. Check it out today at the link in the video description. We began our quest by looking at a bunch of older devices near the five-year mark from the likes of OnePlus, HTC, and Google. But most of them were either no longer officially maintained by Lineage OS, our ROM of choice, or weren't easily or cheaply purchasable, or didn't have a removable battery. And that last one is something we really want, because no amount of fresh software is going to fix a worn-out lithium battery. We were actually getting kind of discouraged until we stumbled upon the LG G3. It was a pretty big deal when it launched back in 2014, with its top tier specs and, at the time, super high-res 1440 screen. And today, not only are there heaps of them for sale on eBay, but they can be had for a mere $50, with replacement batteries from companies like iFixit coming in at under $20. Perfect. Now, before you run out and buy one, though, make sure you get the version of the G3 that corresponds to your cellular carrier. Even though most of the changes between the variants are just the bloatware that comes pre-installed on them, it's probably not worth risking using a different one unless you have no other choice. So for us, then, the D852 was the way to go. Oh! Oof. Not much in the way of packaging on this thing. But hey, wow, not bad. This is in great condition. There's hardly a scuff on it. Hoo, original battery. We'll definitely need the replacement one. Now, as much as we hoped that this was going to be as simple as one, two, three, click and you're done, unfortunately, Jake quickly discovered that it was going to be a bit more of an involved process. Now, there are multiple methods of gaining the administrative access that we need to install our third-party OS, otherwise known as routing, but none of them have been updated to work on the latest version of Android that LG rolled out for the G3. Thankfully, though, unlike iOS, we can downgrade Android, with the easiest method being to roll back to KitKat. Then from there, routing is essentially one-click. Then we can install our custom recovery software and install LineageOS. Now, we'll have some more details in a forum post down below if you guys aren't familiar with this process. Before we begin the downgrade, you guys need to know a couple of things. One, this tutorial is specific to the LG G3. If you're looking to flash LineageOS or some other ROM to a different phone, Google, YouTube, and the XDA forums are your best friends. Two, this process will result in your phone being completely wiped. You have been warned. Now, let's get into it. Start by downloading and installing first the LG USB drivers, and second, the LG UP DLL, then LG UP itself. This is the tool that we're going to use to downgrade the phone. Once you have the software ready to go, download and extract the respective KitKat ROM for your device. We've got a D852, and we'll be using the Bell version specifically. Now, we plug the phone into our PC, go into Settings, About Phone, Software Info, and tap Build Number until it says, You are now a developer. If only it was that easy, right? Then we go back into the main Settings menu, into Developer Options, and enable USB debugging. This will allow our computer to communicate with the phone. You'll also want to swipe down on the notification tray and enable MTP USB mode. On the PC, open up LG UP as an administrator, select your device and the.tot file and click Start. Give it a couple minutes, and you'll eventually be greeted by your KitKat-equipped G3. Set up the phone quickly, then head over to Settings and enable USB debugging again. With that turned on, we can download and run the one-click purple Drake root. Say yes to permanently rooting, as this OS is going to be wiped for Lineage OS shortly anyway, and then, we're actually getting really close now. But before we can install our OS, we'll need a custom recovery to be able to flash it. This is where TWRP comes into play. Download the TWRP app from the Play Store onto the phone, then copy over the TWRP file that's linked in the description. Select the file from your device's storage in the app and flash it, then reboot to recovery mode. Now is actually a really good time to back up your install of KitKat on the off chance that something goes wrong. So do that, and copy it over to your PC. Then, we can wipe everything off the device as shown. Last but not least, we'll need to grab the latest nightly build of Lineage OS for our device, and open Google Apps, since they don't come with Lineage OS by default, and no Play Store on Android is a pretty rockin' bad time. So we select ARM, Android 8.1, and the Nano version for that. Then once we've got both, we can copy them over to the device, and then install. Restart the phone and... WABAM! Lineage OS is good to go! From here, you can install any missing Google Apps from the Play Store, because basically none of them come by default, and then you can optionally install the Magisk root if you'd like to do root-related things. Not everybody's into that, though. So all that's left now, then, is to take this puppy for a little test drive. For the $70 total that we spent, is this a compelling option? Let's put it up next to our iPhone, which, believe it or not, still costs nearly twice that much on eBay, and find out. Well, one thing's for darn tootin' sure. Apple, while they definitely didn't have a screen size advantage at this point in time... Or resolution. Or resolution advantage, definitely had brighter screens. Like, that is a... that is a marked difference. I don't even think the iPhone's a mess. I think it's a Lineage OS thing, because as I recall, when this was stock, it was a little brighter. I'm not 100% sure, and that sounds a little bit weird, but... I kind of feel like it was better before. All right, well, why don't we go ahead and fire up a video? Do you need some help? Yeah, can we just go to the beginning? Ready? Three, two, one, and go! Okay, well, I did the... Whatever, close enough, cool. There you go. All right. You gotta give Apple credit for the color accuracy of their displays, though even back then, you can tell this is far more true-to-life than this is. It's more washed out, it's a little bit too warm. The screen is so much bigger on here. Yeah, it's definitely gonna be better for content absorption, consumption. So I downloaded PUBG on both of them, right? Which is a big game, like about a gigabyte, and it was completely done along with the like 10 other apps I downloaded on this phone before PUBG was even done on that one. One thing though is that... Speakers. Yeah, should we try it out? This is before front-facing speakers were really much of a thing, although the HTC One did do that around this time, but Apple, even though they were still doing just the bottom firing speaker, that's still a lot better than a rear speaker. That was one of my big complaints about this phone at the time. Yeah, I'll crank this up, let's see how they do. Is it harder to cover it up with your hand, though? Like either way, you're gonna have to cup it, right? It sounds kind of crappy. Okay, positive recycle. Yeah. Have you dropped this in the toilet or something? This doesn't sound like a regular iPhone. No, it's... Yeah, it's basically... I dropped it, yes, but not in the toilet. Moral of the story, they both kind of sound like garbage. All right, so gaming-wise, we have PUBG Mobile loaded. It is capped at 30 FPS, and we're on low settings, but... How you feeling? It's playable, although I am seeing frame drops as well. Yeah, it seems like that's a common trend with mobile games, but I'm definitely having an experience that I would say is acceptable. It's kind of like Xbox 360 graphics, but if you like play one of those games on a laptop, that can't quite do it. So gaming-wise, we're on a pretty even playing field, but let's try web browsing. So I think for this test, we should just load up a couple of the same websites. Wow, you're already typing things great, Alex. It's working fine. It's working fine. It searches for FU Jake really well. Okay. What's a site we can load? Ours, Technica. Ready? Yeah. Three, two, one, go. Alright, so Android looks like it was winning a little bit there. Yeah. It still hasn't even loaded all the way on there. LTD forum? Yeah, sure. Let's go to the corporate site, because I think we already did the forum earlier. Let's go Linus Media Group. Three, two, one, go. Oh, iPhone's really chugging now. I mean, like final load time, I think we're pretty close. Yeah, true. It did look like at the start there that this was going a little bit faster, but I think that was just... I mean, overall, they're both pretty similar. I mean, it looked like the G3 was edging out a little bit at the start, but overall, acceptable, usable, pretty similar. We can take a quick look at Lineage OS. For those not familiar, it's very similar to your stock Android experience, so to speak. So not a ton of like extras or anything like that, but... You can load up whatever launcher you want, though. So if you want to get the ruthless pixel launcher, make it look like a pixel or any of them really, even the Microsoft one is actually pretty good. I don't know if you've seen that before. Whereas on an iPhone, it's gonna be an iPhone. I think we can go deeper than this, though, because one of the things that Android was really behind Apple on in this era was rear camera quality. Oh, yeah. We know that software is a major component of mobile camera performance, so I think maybe, why don't you take some pictures, run around, get some other people's impressions, and see what they think of our five-year Android versus five-year iPhone experience. When we get to the camera, the gap between devices starts to become a little more apparent. We took three identical photos on each phone and threw a Pixel 3 in as a modern reference, and it's clear to see the G3 definitely falls behind a bit. Colors are more washed out and the noise is definitely more noticeable compared to the iPhone 6. Now, this is likely because Lineage OS is supported across such a wide range of devices, meaning its camera app isn't gonna have the same image post-processing that's specifically tuned by the manufacturer for a given device. You can tinker with these settings in the included camera app to help with this, so we'd recommend doing that. It actually looks like our older Android device, be it the LG G3 or one from another manufacturer, holds up shockingly well if you can get an OS like Lineage OS that is fully supported with security updates. I actually am blown away by how much phone we got for just $70 after we replaced the battery with a brand new unit, which, remember, makes this thing, because it's not like SoCs degrade over time, functionally brand spanking new. Now, it is missing some creature comforts. We've got USB micro B instead of type C. It's not as durable, it's not as fast, it doesn't charge as quickly, no wireless charging, obviously. Mobile speakers have come a long way in the last five years, this wimpy rear speaker here compared to the, you know, dual front or side, but sounds kind of front firing speakers on something like a Note 9, and of course, no biometric authentication, really did feel like going back in time compared to facial scanners or fingerprint scanners, especially the ones under the screen and the like. Bottom line is unless you need iMessage, this is looking like a very compelling option if you want to save a buck and you've got the time to invest in it. Or if all that looks like way too much work, an older iPhone is still a solid choice. Just make sure the battery is up to snuff. Speaking of being worth investing in, how about a Ring doorbell? Ring is on a mission to reduce crime in communities, and with their 1080p HD resolution and 160 degree vision, having one on your door is definitely a step in the right direction. They've got an adjustable motion sensor, two-way audio so you can talk to whoever's at your front door, it's Wi-Fi capable so you can always check what's going on wherever you are, and it's powered by 8 to 24 volt AC, so that's your existing doorbell wiring or the battery bank. It connects via an app that can work on your smartphone or desktop with Mac and Windows support, and they've got a special offer at the link below for their doorbell camera kit that includes the video doorbell too, a spotlight cam, and a solar security sign. So check it out at ring.com slash LTT. We're gonna have that linked below. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum which you should totally join.