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Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

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

#101
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It can matter, depending on what responsibilities the particular browser offloads to the OS. I just like to ask, so we can diagnose issues fully :)

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

#102
from the comments, don't kill the messenger

>Can I use this article as a case study for Journo students on 'How NOT to approach a topic'? You took a wonderful subject and turned it into a gloating, patrnonizing pile of crap. Bravo. The takeaways from this article essentially are 'Cheaper products perform less efficiently than more expensive ones' and 'India is full of poor people'. Yep, right, We did not know this earlier. Thanks for your investigative journalism.

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

#103
post #87

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.

If you installed Windows 7 on that machine it would probably be slow, though. I think this one was running Android 4 when new. Probably it would have been better with a version made a few years earlier. I looked into rooting it to install a more lightweight OS, but this was my first experience with that and it doesn't seem to be a popular phone to hack.

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

#104
post #68

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…

I find it a bit disheartening that in this day and age, one apparently needs a good enough phone if one wants to date. :)

Thankfully, just for texting capabilities and not appearances. If I was able to hook up my flip phone to SMS I would have kept using that. Also, it’s fairly egalitarian since ‘good phone’ was satisfied adequately by this $40 prepaid from RadioShack.

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

#105
post #102

from the comments, don't kill the messenger >Can I use this article as a case study for Journo students on 'How NOT to approach a topic'? You took a wonderful subject and turned it into a gloating, patrnonizing pile of crap. Bravo. The takeaways from this article essentially are 'Cheaper products perform less efficiently than more expensive ones' and 'India is full of poor people'. Yep, right, We did not know this ea…

That comment seem unfair, there's a lot of other stuff in the article.

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

#106

The problem here is mostly the piece of s * Android OS. 1gb of storage is enough for a complete OS(100mb) and user files. 256mb ram and 500mhz single core is enough to drive a good OS without very much latency. And we only need a few functionalities (communicate and record) ... The 1000000 apps are a symptom we are confused about how computers work best. In time, we will have to figure this out, or we will have deser…

Or in general, blame software bloat and the developers who push this sordid movement of inefficiency upon everyone else. A 1.3GHz quad-core with 512MB of RAM should be plenty powerful for what people use smartphones for; it wasn't too long ago when the typical desktop PC was around that specification (albeit only a single core) --- and yet, people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat, and otherwise most…

> people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat,

I used a 260 MHz Win98SE for VOIP and video chat a long time ago (when Win98SE was current).

No one cares about efficiency any more.

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

#107
When I made an app I went and bought the cheapest Android I could find to check the thing ran ok as I use an iPhone normally. It was quite interesting - I made it display a bit less stuff and the UI less fiddly as the screen response was bad. I think devs should in general try catering for the worst devices and network connections. One reason WhatsApp won, especially in India, was it worked as a java applet on old phones when the competition couldn't be bothered with that.

I'm not convinced by the current trend of everything requiring a ton of javascript frameworks to display some text info and similar. It causes issues along those lines.

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

#108
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It can matter, depending on what responsibilities the particular browser offloads to the OS. I just like to ask, so we can diagnose issues fully :)

True true, I was just idly wondering how many OS-dependent bugs people had seen, as a rough proportion.

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

#109
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can matter, depending on what responsibilities the particular browser offloads to the OS. I just like to ask, so we can diagnose issues fully :)

True true, I was just idly wondering how many OS-dependent bugs people had seen, as a rough proportion.

Firefox on iOS and Firefox on Android are completely different beasts, OS definitely matters when Apple forces you to use their layout engine.

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

#110

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.

Right, one would think it would work since the phone had SMS built in, and it was the same carrier (Virgin, i believe using the Sprint network). I have no idea of the technical details but I assume it’s some protocol version incompatibility.
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