The biggest thing for me is speakers nowadays. My MotoX Pure has awesome speakers. I use the phone is speaker phone mode A LOT and I also like to listen to news and music on it without earbuds.
All the high-end phones have big gorgeous screens and beefy processors, and come with large storage and sometimes an SD card slot, but speakers are something that there's still a lot of variety on.
I was looking at the Pixel in the store the other day (last years - new one's not out yet). It looked nice, but the speakers had nowhere near the volume of my MotoX Pure.
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
It has expandable storage and a 3.5mm headphone jack too. I'd like a replaceable battery but two out of three ain't bad. This will definitely be on my shortlist for a new phone. I'm still on an Samsung S5 so I'm not in any big hurry to upgrade.
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez