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

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

#61

Post by praneshp » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 3:54 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #46

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…

Except this phone isn't for kids, this is for people where the phone may be there only device. No laptop, no desktop, no parent to organise things for them.

I'm not sure the target customers of this phone organize things on their phone (TFA has a quote from Micromax related to this).

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

#62

Post by iKSv2 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 4:04 AM UTC

spraak wrote: post #57

> According to data from app analytics firm App Annie, Indians spend 36% of their screentime on communication (like WhatsApp), 20% on video players (like YouTube), and 16% on social networking (Facebook). I wonder how much of that is self fulfilling due to the low powered devices?

Most, I mean upwards of 60-70% always search for charging point the first thing they arrive anywhere (be it airport, Hotel or even office). Always the devices are on charge. Always.

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

#63

Post by zhte415 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 4:18 AM UTC

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.

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

#64

Post by TomK32 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 4:59 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…

I bought a used Galaxy S3 Mini a few years back after my two years without any phone at all. Had to replace the screen once but even that was a used part.

I think people should put their phone into sleeves more often, I see them walking on the street carrying the phone unused and unprotected in their hands and accidents happen too often.

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

#65

Post by toredash » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:08 AM UTC

bm1362 wrote: post #37

I work in mobile performance and have built out an automated testing workflow for our CI system to try and prevent big breaking changes to these types of phones. The issue with testing these phones is the device introduces lots of variance due to the low hardware standards. We typically test for relative changes in key metrics and want to move to testing different types of phones for usability. This is generally hard…

How do you this testing? Any public service?

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

#66

Post by hitekker » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:16 AM UTC

>Vikas Jain, Micromax’s cofounder, was not concerned when I brought this up to him. “Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone, or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone,” he told me in a phone interview. “These people aren’t really bothered about how fast the processor is, or how clear and rich the display is. Their needs are a lot more...basic, and as long as they get decent battery life, a decent camera, and a basic internet surfing experience, they are satisfied.”

A market ripe for disruption.

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

#67

Post by hesarenu » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:21 AM UTC

So its just best selling phone under $75 not the best selling mobile which i would take would be Samsung or Xiaomi.

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

#68

Post by pferde » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:29 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…

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

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

#69

Post by vedtopkar » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #66

>Vikas Jain, Micromax’s cofounder, was not concerned when I brought this up to him. “Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone, or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone,” he told me in a phone interview. “These people aren’t really bothered about how fast the processor is, or how clear and rich the display is. Their needs are a lot more...basic, and as lo…

How so? Seems like the features/specs provided line up pretty well with the $60 price point. Are there examples of basic smartphones in this price range with significantly better features? (Legitimately don't know)

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

#70

Post by bgirard » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #29

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…

I've been surprised by how performant you can get with CSS transitions and a will-change property. But good grief is it difficult . On one hand I understand why a transition on `left` isn't hardware accelerated but a `translate3d` is, but on the other it seems crazy that we expect people to think and know this kind of stuff when they just want to do something very simple.

That's was my intention when I proposed will-changed. I was trying to get the Firefox OS home screen slide transitions to be performant without hard coding it in the Gecko layout engine.