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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I made a very good decision this time around; I wanted the cheapest phone that was fingerprint-protected and had USB Type-C, since I wanted it to last me several years and pin codes are painful.

I got my current phone for 160€ (if I'm not mistaken) 1.5 years ago and I couldn't be happier. Browses the web perfectly and runs my few apps great, I'll keep it until it breaks. I'm so happy that I'm even considering buying an extra screen to have reparaibility in the future in case they are hard to find then!

It's funny that many of my non-tech friends who spent half a month salary on an iPhone (Spain) are quite confused about me using a cheap android.

Edit: also note that my 160€ phone now is way better than those 400€ phones 6-8 years ago. And there's not even that much difference with a current 800-1000€ phone.

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The oligopoly juiced prices for flagships and is shocked it affected demand.

People have substitutes.

Even if you want a niche feature like Google Fi support, you have to dig a bit but the Moto Android one entries are fine.

Internal memory is tight though. Expandable memory can't support apps or the OS, where sizes are growing...

Seems trivial to give these all 256 or 512 gb but they are stubbornly kneecapped on space and hard to expand.

Maybe space is how manufacturers are fighting back. We know with the battery scandals they aren't averse to "justifiable" planned obscelesce.

When do we get a dozen low cost Shenzhen competitors to diversify the market?

If you have an unlimited no throttling data plan you can just put everything in the cloud.

I plan to upgrade my phone (unless it breaks first) when I can get either 1TB or unlimited data :)

I realize it might take 3-5 years, but that's okay.

Almost nobody has these though...

That's certainly not ideal. My connection gets dropped all the time just walking around, not to mention going into a building, and carriers aren't incentivized to upgrade their infrastructure to make it more reliable.

I have nearly that and put all media I can in the cloud, but it's still complaining about space because I have apps installed, a feature the phone apparently wasn't designed for.

Being able to stream an app would be nice.

Wait a second... we have those, they are called websites.

Maybe apps themselves are the problem.

>Seems trivial to give these all 256 or 512 gb but they are stubbornly kneecapped on space and hard to expand.

Fast, durable storage is a lot more expensive than an SD card with dismal random performance a few thousand cycles of endurance. The big-name manufacturers do use storage as a segmentation feature, but many new manufacturers are happy to offer you reasonably-priced storage and microSD expansion.

>When do we get a dozen low cost Shenzhen competitors to diversify the market?

We've already got them - Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Elephone, Ulefone, UMIDIGI, Cubot, Oukitel, Blackview and a whole bunch of others. Only the first three are likely to be competitive on the western market, but Xiaomi are already taking big bites of market share in many European markets. They'll sell you a perfectly serviceable mid-ranger for $150 and a flagship killer for $300.

Huawei? I've been very skeptical as to whether recent negative press is motivated [in part] by protectionism. They seem to have taken a lot of telecoms market share (in the UK at least).

I wouldn't really class Huawei in the same group. They do sell a number of reasonably-priced midrange phones, but they're a multinational telecoms behemoth with a very peculiar ownership structure. IMO they're the Chinese Samsung rather than a genuinely disruptive player.

> The oligopoly juiced prices for flagships and is shocked it affected demand.

It didn't affect demand, it affected market clearing quantity because demand was not (assuming, arguendo, the description of surprise is correct) what the makers involved in the “juicing” of prices thought it would be.

OTOH, if there are effectively competing alternatives to those offered by the “oligopoly”, then it is not an oligopoly.

Or just lag the smartphone cycle. I upgraded from 5C to a 6S a couple months back by snagging my friend’s used phone. It’s amazing in every way. Could not be happier. I can’t wait to see what the iPhone X has in store in 2022 or so :-)

This is a good strategy for most consumers. I paid $150 for my iPhone 6 on swappa, and couldn’t be happier. Still going strong.

This is less possible on the Android side of things. The standard now is three years of security updates from the time of first release. And this often doesn't include device driver and some middleware updates.

Obviously people do hold on to phones for longer than the support term but that's far from ideal.

Is that in USA? I had to bypass my UK provider to install any updates. I imagine software updates limit hardware updates considerably.

If I could buy a new 128GB SE, I’d do it. I waited too long and now they’re only available used or in the 32GB size. I’d still be using my 5S (it still has the latest OS and works well), but I wanted to try the Apple Watch and it required an upgrade.

Why not just go used? I got mine on eBay for under $240 shipped. It was 'B' grade according to the seller, which from what I could determine meant it had literally two scratches on it instead of zero, otherwise the device was flawless. Battery health was 98%.

The real reason is I thought I had 30 days to return the XR, but it turned out to be 14 and so now I have it :-)

The theoretical reason is I trust a phone more if I know it’s direct from Apple.

Now that I have the XR + Watch combo, I’m seeing if I can get by treating the XR as a “desk phone” and the Watch as a “mobile phone”. So far that’s been working out pretty well. If I get tired of it, I may rethink things and try to get a used SE.

>I wanted the cheapest phone that was fingerprint-protected

Just because it says "fingerprint-protected" on the tin, doesn't mean it has good fingerprint protection.

Depends on the use case of the "fingerprint-protected". For me, the fingerprint sensor is just the fastest way to open my phone.

Even with no security/pattern you have to first press the power button, then swipe up. With a fingerprint reader, you tap your finger to the sensor and the screen is not only on, but the lockscreen (swipe) was bypassed.

which phone specifically did you choose? now I am tempted to buy the same model..

Local Spanish brand so not very useful here...

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