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

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

#91

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:21 AM UTC

joshvm wrote: post #84

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 eith…

About 4 years ago, before my current employment made owning a smartphone a necessity, I was a dumb phone user. I was able to easily give up Reddit, HN, other various things but the single most painful missing thing to give up was maps.

My approach at the time was to route on my laptop and print directions. It worked most of the time but still was rather painful.

It ended up being a lot cheaper though. When I was a poor college kid I was able to get on a prepaid plan with no data, unlimited text and like 200 minutes of calling a month (way more than almost anyone in this day and age uses) for about $15 a month.

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

#92

Post by known » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:29 AM UTC

Markoff wrote: post #8

I 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

https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/ rocks

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

#93

Post by ricardobeat » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

Sounds like a terrible choice of phone, and I haven’t seen this model in the actual top 10 list.

I’m currently testing a Redmi 5 (should retail for ~100, maybe less) and it is impressive. Eight cores, great screen, fingerprint sensor, 3300mah battery, all in a very nice package - only let down so far is the camera.

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

#94

Post by notjtrig » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:50 AM UTC

I'm writing this on a low end Android I bought 2 years ago for $25 bucks. ZTE force n9100, 1 GB ram, 1.5 GHz android 4.1.2 It works great for browsing the web and YouTube, havent tried anything else. It's just as responsive as any phone if not more responsive. The problem the author has is with the software, the hardware is exceptional in any phone, although 512 megs of ram may limit it somewhat.

Has anyone ever done anything productive with a cellphone? I doubt it.

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

#95

Post by vanderZwan » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 11:02 AM UTC

notjtrig wrote: post #94

I'm writing this on a low end Android I bought 2 years ago for $25 bucks. ZTE force n9100, 1 GB ram, 1.5 GHz android 4.1.2 It works great for browsing the web and YouTube, havent tried anything else. It's just as responsive as any phone if not more responsive. The problem the author has is with the software, the hardware is exceptional in any phone, although 512 megs of ram may limit it somewhat. Has anyone ever done…

The problem with the software eating up space is partially that Android itself seems to assume a ton of storage space as soon as you go beyond Android 4. I had an HTC Desire that I had to get rid of simply because the Play Store kept upgrading itself and eating up all remaining storage

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

#96

Post by anewhnaccount2 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 11:11 AM UTC

Sounds like the assumptions of newer versions of Android and the ecosystem may mean feature phones like the Jiophone (running the FirefoxOS successor) can be competitive on the basis of the hardware and software actually being in step with each other.

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

#97

Post by Hamuko » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 11:22 AM UTC

hayksaakian wrote: post #16

vidanay wrote: post #5

I'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?

Operating system bloat and app bloat. A motorola droid was super fast, I had it for years. If you made a brand new motorola droid today with the same exact hardware and software it would be too. Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time: https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth It's for iOS but the same logic follows for android

>Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time

What the fuck did Google add to Gmail in 2016?

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

#98

Post by walshemj » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 11:48 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…

To old to work with SMS I doubt that :-) it just the poor way sms was implemented in the USA. Though I thought they had solved most of the really egregious problems ie cross etwork SMS now.

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

#99

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 12:27 PM UTC

osrec wrote: post #83

syspec wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A bit off-topic, but does the OS matter? Don't all browsers render the same between OSes? Although I can see them being different in things like font rendering...

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

#100

Post by oneTimePeet » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 12:28 PM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #36

poulsbohemian wrote: post #27

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…

If you really need just calls, dumbphones are still a thing, and I see plenty for sale here in provincial China (/me waves from Xining). The article's point is that cheap smartphones aren't working well for their intended users because the vast majority of apps aren't designed for their limitations.

Well, this should be easy- open the Git-Repository from five years ago, compile the old version of the app and release.

The irony is - you cant do that, because maybe, just maybee all your current users would drop the HOT NEW SHINY, bloat-add-ware in the store, like a hot rock, if they could go back to something basic- basically have the whats-app experience, before the feature bloat came.