For everyone still struggling with trying to get a new usable phone, after buying and selling a tone of TVs, Monitors graphic cards and phones in the past year just to find a usable phone, I can tell you, with almost absolute certainty, that what is making recent phones unusable, is “Temporal Dithering” not PWM! I think we have been digging down into PWM while this tech has been the unknown eye killer all this time! This disgusting tech is being abused in literally everything these days, from monitors to smartphones to even the RTX graphic cards (I have an RTX 3070ti, and I cannot use it because of dithering! It dithers even in windows with no way to turn it off!).
Personally, the most high-end phone I have been able to use has been the Galaxy Note 5. I can't find any info on the PWM frequency of this phone, but I know that it has it. But it doesn't make it unusable for me. I have used it for 8 years and I only got massive eyestrain and headaches when using it, none stop for days and weeks.
It's interesting that I read among the comments here that people are getting eye strains after certain software updates, which could solidify my theory because, I think dithering can be both on a software and hardware level.
Here's the list of unusable phones I have tried in the past year:
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE (Both PWM and horrible dithering)
Realme 7 5G (LCD with No PWM but horrible dithering)
Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus (Both PWM and horrible dithering)
Redmi Note 8 pro (LCD with No PWM but horrible dithering)
Huawei Mate 10 Lite (LCD with no PWM but horrible dithering)
The worst part is that it is even being used in LCDs with no PWM and not just OLEDs!
So make sure to go for a phone that at least Notebookcheck.net says has no temporal dithering, as they are actually now checking phones for temporal dithering too. You can see the tests on their YouTube channel.
The only 2 midrange phones that I have my eyes on now that might be "the usable phone" are the:
POCO X4 GT (LCD with an extremely high PWM frequency and no dithering)
POCO F4 (AMOLED with a rather high PWM frequency of 400 and no severe dithering)
If you want a Mid-range, give these 2 a try and tell us about your experience. The POCO F4 is riskier I guess, but it has an AMOLED, and its camera has OIS so might be worth the risk,
I literally have no more money left to test stuff. I can't give stuff back here, and I have to sell them second handed to friends. I have lost tones of money in this process, and now I am trying to repair my Note 5 as I have given up.