161–170 of 601 posts
My pixel 3a is by far the best phone I have ever owned (across both iOS and Android). Comparing the 4a to this it looks like a bunch of solid incremental improvements across the board. Huge fan of basically everything here. Price, screen size, phone size. Battery size could be a touch bigger, as my 3a has the best battery life I just wish for about 10% more for edge cases.
I can only hope they will revisit face unlock in the era of face masks. I greatly prefered fingerprint unlock. I treat either of these as tamper resistance rather than actual security, but I find fingerprint unlock to be a much better experience.
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So if the specification weren't important for you, why did you bother? I think it's quite nice to have the choice, upgradability, price range, etc.
You ever tried to buy an IBM Thinkpad? There are like 20,000 configurations displayed on the same single website page. It’s a disaster shopping for pre-assembled PC’s.
Second, this is just because they know who their market is. They're deliberately not marketing their laptops to people who don't want to have to handle a little bit of complexity in exchange for flexibility.
Apple is the Sony rx100; good but not great sensor, good but not great lens, good but not great audio. Everything is fixed and you can only make superficial changes.
Thinkpad is the Red Komodo; everything is optional, but it doesn't even include vital components in the box unless you know to order them.
You can get decent results with the former, and it requires very little thought or experience to buy and use. There is a much higher ceiling for getting exactly what you want with the latter, but it requires you to know exactly what you're doing and be willing to do some work on your setup.
Neither option is objectively better.
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350 dollars is "budget"?
$349 for a phone that will get full OS updates for 3 years works out to $9.69 per month. That's pretty solid. The competing Apple variant (lower res HDish screen but much faster CPU) is the iPhone SE 128GB for $449. It will probably get OS updates for 5 years which works out to $7.48 per month.
The 4a is looking nice, especially at the price point and for a "stock" android experience. I've started looking for a replacement to my Essential PH-1 since my USB port is getting very loose, and charging is becoming difficult. I wonder if there will be a demand for people who got the PH-1 on fire sale? This price point to features is what we've been missing since the early nexus days. The 3a was a nice step in this…
Sometimes these also have an adverse effect. For example a misleading title can lead to mob lynching.
Verge should write responsibly.
I can only hope they will revisit face unlock in the era of face masks. I greatly prefered fingerprint unlock. I treat either of these as tamper resistance rather than actual security, but I find fingerprint unlock to be a much better experience.
Agreed; I don't see face unlock significantly more convenient in than fingerprint unlock. I guess it's a little more automatic, but I find I have to wiggle my phone around any way in order to get it to recognize my face. In practice, I end up having to spend the same amount of time making faces at my phone as I did touching the fingerprint sensor. Even before face-masks, I found that my Pixel 4 can't recognize me wit…
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You mean, like those things ? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0832JRZZK
I'd prefer one made by Google that just matches the phone and the curvature of the end. I don't know why I was downvoted...but some people don't need the headphone jack, but still want a reasonably priced phone. A simple fix is to just sell a plug that matches the phone.
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It's important to point out that the vast majority of phones are sold through the channel - carriers will probably choose to sell their own subset of all the options based on their own market research.
Do you have a cite for this? Amazon, Best Buy, and Apple.com alone make up 42% of overall smartphone sales[0]. Verizon is the largest carrier, at only 11% of total sales. And internationally the picture is even worse for carrier channels. [0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/amazon-leads-online-sma...
> According to the latest research from the Counterpoint Smartphone Channel Share Tracker service, the share of the online smartphone channels grew to 12% share of the total US smartphone sales in Q1 2018. Despite US consumers being massive online consumers, brick and mortar establishments remain king when it comes to purchasing smartphones.
>Carriers and national retailers have large store counts that they are leveraging to get consumers to physically touch and test high-end devices, so they know what they are buying. Stores also provide a better opportunity to up-sell accessories and insurance.
Amazon makes up 42% of online sales, which is only 12% of sales overall.
If you have ever been inside of a Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile store, you would be interested to see how their selections compare.