Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
1–10 of 131 posts
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#2iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone?
I am surprised :).
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#3I remember buying a burner phone in India once and it hurt my ears when I received calls. It turned out the phone only had one loudness setting which was at a level able to pierce through the din of Mumbai. Ear bleedingly loud.
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#4This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don’t have to.
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#5I'd be interested to know how these $60 phones perform compared to a 9 year old Motorola Droid. Obviously, the level of content 9 years ago was at least an order of magnitude less than today, but how much of these devices slowness is content vs delivery technology? Is it because web apps are dynamic instead of static? Is it a matter of framework bloat? What is really the root cause of the terrible performance?
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#6I did an experiment similar to this a few years back, but I lasted about six months. After touchscreen on my iPhone 6 Plus died prematurely two days after the warranty expired, and neither Apple nor Verizon would help, I decided to simply forgo owning a smartphone for a while. I used one on WiFi only, and went back to an LCD flip phone from 2002. This worked great, except people kept complaining that they couldn’t text me. I try to get sms set up, but they said my phone was too old to work with their current network.
Then I moved somewhere new and wanted to do some dating. It was obvious I was going to need a real phone. I bought a Kyocera Hydro for $40. It has similar specs to the device in the review - 1 GB ram, 1 GB clock speed, 2 MP camera: https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Ky...
My first impression was that it was amazing to get a device like this for $40, if you put it in a perspective from 5 or 15 years ago. Out of the box, though, the system couldn’t keep up with typing. Simply entering text was a strain on the processor. In general though, it seemed roughly as capable as an iPod Touch G4, though with inferior system software, but less capable than a Samsung Galaxy S3. I would complain about the buggy firmware and apps but it seems no worse than Motorola or Samsung, who are each poor in the regard compared to Apple. The main drawback was the camera. Battery life on it is still better than my current iPhone. Reception is poor.
To make a long story short, after using the phone for six months, I realized that I should’ve just bought an iPhone 4s for $50. I would have had at the least a good camera and OS updates.
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#7iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone? I am surprised :).
I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900 for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was constantly fishing for an excuse to get rid of it. I finally came to the conclusion that I had to spend about at least $400 for a phone I'd be happy with (I wanted new + 32GB internal storage + not-crappy camera + removable battery). That strategy has worked well for me so far!
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#8I was surprised the choice was not Xiaomi, the experience would be vastly different for slightly more money
if writer would not set Pierce limit it Redmi note 4 should be best selling phoned in India
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#9The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.
Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days
#10This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don’t have to.
I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software.
Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware.
I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can’t we make an experience today that runs on low end, but still vastly more powerful hardware than the original iPhone?