Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days • Hacker News Board

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#81

Post by microtonal » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:13 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #80

microtonal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They released the 3.1 in May and it seems that they bumped up the specs quite a bit (4 to 8 core, 2 to 3GB RAM, 32GB storage).

https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/...

Last week I bought a Nokia 6.1 and it is pretty fast. I have been an iPhone user since 2009 (with an Android excursion 2013-2015). But my beloved 64GB iPhone SE had water damage after a bike ride through the rain last week. And I didn't want to buy a new iPhone just ~2 months before the keynote. I'll see after the keynote whether I'll buy a/the new iPhone or whether the Nokia is good enough.

At any rate, I am very impressed what they are doing. I hope they stay on this course. I think there is a place for phones with pure Android and regular updates, but that is cheaper than the Pixel line. Basically the void that Nexus left.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#82

Post by KrishnaAnaril » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:14 AM UTC

mayankkaizen wrote: post #60

bigdaddyrabbit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.

I too have never seen anybody using it in at least North India. In fact, I never ever heard anyone even talking about it. Unlike many people here, I am actually very close to rural life in India and I couldn't spot this phone. South India may be? I don't know how it was the best selling phone in India.

I live in Kerala (South India) and I haven't seen this phone with anyone. Most of them uses budget phones from Samsung which costs around 5k-8k INR.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#83

Post by osrec » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:36 AM UTC

syspec wrote: post #78

osrec wrote: post #21

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.

May I know which browser and OS you're using please?

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#84

Post by joshvm » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:45 AM UTC

I've been using a Nokia 216 for a month while my smartphone gets repaired. It has 4G and Bluetooth, but not WiFi (why?). It has a lousy camera, but the LED torch is good. It has threaded texts (this is not common, apparently) and the battery lasts forever even using data. There is no GPS nor, tragically, Snake.

You get Opera Mini installed which is... an experience. There is no cache (and probably hardly any RAM either), so if you close the browser your entire session gets deleted. History somewhat works. Every now and then you get an ad injected - the ad never seems to change. My phone is trying to make me buy a German Honor A10. I live in the UK.

Javascript, of course, is not supported. If you want to interact with an element it refreshes the entire page and re-renders it to reflect the update.

It makes it painfully obvious which websites are really optimised for mobile, which ones just have a setting for small screens, and which don't bother at all. Simple sites work well - HN comments is good, most news websites (e.g. BBC) work, Wikipedia is fine. People are astounded when I can fact-check in the pub. Browsing Google images is also surprisingly good. Pages with custom fonts often don't load at all. Forms are hit and miss.

Data usage is really light. I have a 100MB bundle and I barely put a dent in it.

It's, on the whole, usable. I can look up things, check the weather and procrastinate.

What is really missing is maps. Google Maps does not work at all. The interface doesn't work - if you get a list of possible destinations, often you can't click on the one you actually want. There don't seem to be any usable ultra-low bandwidth navigation websites. Bing doesn't even try, and not much luck with Bing either.

If I had access to slack, 2-factor authentication (without using texts) and semi-decent mapping, I'd be tempted not to go back to a smartphone.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#85

Post by mongodude » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

Quite a pointless article! What Micromax founder says is true, their users do not expect a lot from these phones and the idea is to empower the next billion by bringing them closer to information. If you try to use these phones without being a part of the next billion, i.e. people who earn less than $200 per month, you won't have a great experience.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#86

Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:59 AM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #76

amorphid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> it can be done below $400

Absolutely!

I have a Moto G5+. It was under NOK 2000 in January this year, that's less than USD 250. It's great. Much better value than my sister's Huawei P9 which was much more expensive..

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#87

Post by bo1024 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:07 AM UTC

code_duck wrote: post #6

I 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 te…

It's not a hardware problem. Typing worked just fine on Windows 95 withd 8 MB of RAM and 50MHz processor.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#88

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:08 AM UTC

code_duck wrote: post #6

I 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 te…

[deleted]

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#89

Post by srean » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:20 AM UTC

suprfnk wrote: post #44

bovermyer wrote: post #34

...and here my age shows. I remember a time when I used a physical landline phone as my only phone. I didn't care if I missed a call, because the people that I wanted to talk to either would see me at school the next day or would show up at my house if it was important. Texting was nonexistent. Or, to put it another way - eh, life goes on if you can't do a thing.

The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over easier.

> and you will be skipped over easier.

so let them, it is usually worth it.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#90

Post by derReineke » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:20 AM UTC

The author just can't seem to understand the concept that these phones are an upgrade for most Indian users. He mentions it multiple times as if he complained about it to literally everyone he interviewed.