This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.
It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.
I don't know where they got the figures. Micromax does not even have 5% market share these days.
The article talks a lot about storage. Is an SD card not possible? I have a somewhat average Huawei phone that's a couple of years old (sensible charging, battery still good though not great) and a 32GB SD card carries all I need in terms of photo after photo, and app data from less used apps.
SD cards on Androids are kind of weird. It's not always consistent where things will be stored. Unless things have changed, many apps can't be installed to SD (and if you force it, you'll find that they are subtly broken). When you're building the phone to hit a low price point, you might not have the budget for a slot anyway; and unfortunately, you're likely to not put much more storage than is needed to boot the phone; let alone handle the play store updates that will be ready when it's unboxed.
It would really help if Google made translations suck less. They are stored uncompressed in the apk, even though human language text is easily compressed.
The article talks a lot about storage. Is an SD card not possible? I have a somewhat average Huawei phone that's a couple of years old (sensible charging, battery still good though not great) and a 32GB SD card carries all I need in terms of photo after photo, and app data from less used apps.
SD cards on Androids are kind of weird. It's not always consistent where things will be stored. Unless things have changed, many apps can't be installed to SD (and if you force it, you'll find that they are subtly broken). When you're building the phone to hit a low price point, you might not have the budget for a slot anyway; and unfortunately, you're likely to not put much more storage than is needed to boot the ph…
Back in the early Android days, this wasn't the case, you could easily push most apps onto MicroSD. Yet, versions of Android up until adoptable storage was added (which essentially makes your mSD non-removable) have continued to make it more and more difficult to use your MicroSD for storing apps.
I think his expectations are just out of balance. The phone he describes sounds a lot like the phone I gave my kids. I just want them to have a phone that they can use in case of emergencies. That's basically what my baby boomer parents need as well. So he's right, phones at that price point are limited, but that doesn't mean they don't fulfill the needs of portions of the population - just different demographics tha…
These days, basic chat apps are common enough that they're close to core "phone" functionality -- even a few Nokia smartphones had WhatsApp support before they went the way of the dodo.
And one would assume that that's not really that hard to do. After all, for SMS support you've got a very similar set of features already running on the phone. Maybe videos won't work that well, but that shouldn't degrade the basic support.
In New Delhi, I'd also want my kids to have access to some car hailing app and maps. Heck, I'd want a stun gun integrated in the phone…
iPhone 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 g…
I disagree, it can be done below $400. The first two generations of the Moto G where really awesome for the price (Currently, Nokia (they are not really Nokia, but have ex-Nokia staff and are a Finnish company) makes really great Android phones around $200-$300. They are in the Android One program and do 2 years of feature updates and monthly security updates. So far, it seems that they are keeping up this promise. Phones like the Nokia 6.1 are fast, have a nice screen, etc. Obviously, it is not a $700 phone, but speed/quality/update-wise they are very similar to the old Nexus line.
This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.
It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.
It's not. The article used inaccurate term in the title. Later in the article they mentioned it's the "best selling phone for sub $75 brands".
We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA ( https://usebx.com/app ), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Jus…
In the demo, when you mouse over the sales chart it creates a jittery effect.
This is because you're setting the position of an element that has a transition with a curve. In effect it's restarting its animation every time you move the mouse, causing it reset its velocity.
The title is misleading and essentially a clickbait. Later in the article they mentioned:
> At $60, the Bharat 2 is one of the cheapest smartphones in India with 4G LTE and, according to Counterpoint, it was the country’s best-selling smartphone in the sub-$75 price band last year.
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 g…
I disagree, it can be done below $400. The first two generations of the Moto G where really awesome for the price ( Currently, Nokia (they are not really Nokia, but have ex-Nokia staff and are a Finnish company) makes really great Android phones around $200-$300. They are in the Android One program and do 2 years of feature updates and monthly security updates. So far, it seems that they are keeping up this promise.…
I recently bought a Nokia 3 for testing stuff on. It's $179 outright in Australia (so US$150ish) and I've been pretty impressed.
It's slow, but usable. Pure Android, and ok camera, screen and build quality.
(My daily phone is a Pixel, and I have had iPhones in the past to compare)