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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

It's just one model of phone, so it's going to be really hard to please everyone. The items you mentioned are important to you, but don't matter to me. There are other things I care a lot about that won't be there either.

A good market for phones would include products aimed at lots of different bases, but unfortunately for FOSS phones we're not there yet. So my attitude is to support this phone, and hopefully move toward a world where there will be multiple FOSS phones with different feature sets.

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Yes, I am well aware of that. Sometimes I wonder if I should set up a page with a poll to collect what most people would want as a smartphone. Somehow I have the feeling that phone manufacturers don't know anymore what the consumers want and instead build phones with 4 cameras just to present something new (and I am one of those who actually enjoy having a good camera within their phone).

I agree, a lot of products seem that way.

> Sometimes I wonder if I should set up a page with a poll to collect what most people would want as a smartphone

you will get the specs of an high-end kitchen sink for the desired price of a Brondi.

It depends on how you set up that poll. You could attach a price to every feature and let the people decide which feature they want to pay for and what kind of price sensitivity they have (e.g. if they would accept a feature if it would be for free). After you collect the data you analyze the data (e.g. with a cluster analysis) and find out which combinations would have the largest market success.

It would be still hypothetical, but I would expect better (from my point of view) results than the currently available models.

You would be surprised. As long as "demand" is analyzed in the hypothetical, your results will be skewed drastically.

There was a grocery or meal shipment start-up based in London that had all analyzed demand by studying their potential user-base, yet their product never took off. Their result: a lot of people said they would buy, but never did.

The market itself gives you the results you're asking for: Manufacturers are definitely studying and trying everything feasible, since this is such a saturated market.

What sells is where people's priorities are.

Obligatory reference to Homer's car from The Simpsons.

This is why people think big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. are arrogant when they say they're making products we didn't know we needed until we got them. It's not arrogance; it's that their market research is infinitely superior to a simple poll.

With a poll, we're only constrained by our imagination. Real life has more constraints. The thing the big companies do: balance their research with real life.

Set it up! Then you can use the findings to influence manufacturers.

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