First of all i am the same idiot as
>>4191 >>4320 >>4334, so if you're a poorfag like me or simply don't want to spend a lot on a phone go with used ones, but don't buy devices older than 2 years as they're guaranteed to have worn out batteries and replacing them is an extra $50 (not to mention it's a total hassle doing it yourself), and whatever you do don't buy samsung, there's a ton of variants out there for every model and only a select few can be unlocked, for example the Galaxy S7 i first bought was the G930T, which can't be unlocked at all, and the battery duration was dogshit, i always charge my phone before going to bed and even my G5+ woke up with less than 5% battery used overnight, the S7 somehow drained 30% (after "debloating" this was reduced to 20%, but it's still a lot), and even though i use my phone almost exclusively as a DAP ie audio only with the screen off, it wouldn't last me the whole day, by the end of my shift i had about 10% battery left, whereas my G5+ usually ended the whole day with 35% or so. But enough complaining about my samshit, it's time to complain about the Redmi Note 7 i bought a few days ago.
Since my G5+ was a brick by now (i detailed its problems here
>>4191) i decided to browse local shops for pawned phones again, and i ended up stumbling on these two
>>4496, both looked brand new and came with their box and accessories, but this time i didn't buy blindly, i immediately went home and did a thorough research, both were exactly what i was looking for, so i went back a couple hours later and bought the superior one. I got home and immediately began working on unlocking the bootloader (a process facilitated by xiaomi's own tools, mi flash and mi unlock, you just need to make an account on their site), flashing another rom and rooting it, this is where my problems began.
TWRP wouldn't stay no matter what i did, it always reverted back to the stock recovery, so i looked up the issue and found out you just have to flash TWRP once, boot it, then install OrangeFox from there, which is permanent.
So i did exactly that, then i found out that just like my old G5+ did, this thing wouldn't accept custom roms older than the newest android it had installed on the stock rom, so i couldn't flash microG+resurrection remix (10) and had to use pixel experience (11, gapps preinstalled) instead, it's okay though, as titanium backup lets you completely remove anything you don't want.
Another issue was that since i bought the global variant it came with a "super charger" instead of a generic one, sounds good? It has the wrong plug, so until i get an adapter i'll have to rely on the old one i had.
But those are really minor issues compared to the next one. You see, not all Redmi Note 7 phones were manufactured with the same parts, the first batch was shipped with standard panels that had no issues whatsoever, but in order to keep up with demand the following batches had cheaper tianma panels, which have screen retention issues. Mine had one of these, and i didn't notice because screen burn-in/retention is not really a thing on LCD panels. I thought it was a lost cause (it is a very notorious issue in this brand of phones, the Mi/Poco series released that year and the following generation of Note phones all have the same shitty panels, up until the recently released Note 10, which changed it to an AMOLED display), until i read that setting the RGB display values to a lower setting (which can be done even on the stock rom) completely fixes it, thinking it was just a bugman shilling for their shit products i dismissed his advice and went about installing a kernel manager (as another person advised) and toying around with the settings, it didn't work and i was left with yet another $140 brick. Or so i thought, because the next day i decided to follow the chinaman's advice and set the RGB values to 90, and it fucking worked somehow, thinking it was just some fuckery of the MIUI rom (i reflashed the global rom because i wanted to return the phone) i flashed pixel experience again (i had all the files on the sd card) and used the same settings, and the screen ghosting/retention was gone as well, so i decided to give this phone a chance. Holy shit it's great, i finished my shift and the fucking thing still had 75% battery, and 4GB of RAM does make a difference, my old phone crashed while opening some websites on firefox and all apps had to be relaunched every time you quick swapped between them, this one keeps them all in memory and doesn't lag when playing 1080p goytube videos, mx pro used to take roughly a minute to cache the subs of my mkv animus, on this phone it takes 5 seconds. So even though it's not perfect (screen notch and curved screen makes it less than ideal for reading manga, glass front and back, unremovable battery, defective panel) i am very happy with it. Oh and before you ask why i didn't get the Note 7 Pro, Note 8/Pro or Note 9/Pro, it's because they're only very marginal upgrades (even if you get the 6/8GB RAM ones), not to mention they're more than twice as expensive, my country doesn't get the variants with extra RAM, the 8 has less third party support and the 9 copied that fugly tiny hole in the top of the screen and the fuckhuge square camera on the back typical of apple phones.