Hacker News Reader

Comment by bishnu | Hacker News Reader

Is this being sold at a loss? An unlocked 16GB iPhone 4S is costs $650. If not, I'm impressed at the price point Samsung is able to achieve given the Galaxy Nexus's feature parity with the iPhone 4S. Which begs the question, why not spend an extra ~$150 per unit to really blow it out of the water, specs wise?

View on HN

why not spend an extra ~$150 per unit to really blow it out of the water

I think that's called Galaxy SIII. There should also be a new ~$500 Nexus this summer running Jelly Bean.

[citation extremely needed]

You can get a Nokia Lumia 710 for less than $200 unlocked without a contract in the UK.

Why the the iPhone 4S/Galaxy Nexus cost what they do I don't know...

Market. Demand. Profit.

Because the 710 is basically 2 year old hardware. It's absurd to compare it to modern flagship devices.

Why?

Does the same stuff quite happily.

Much as my 5 year old laptop does the same stuff quite happily as a modern flagship device.

Even though gouranga is being downvoted for saying the same thing I'm about to, it bears repeating. Specs matter in the Android world. The faster the phone, the better your experience. This is a tradeoff of an open, general purpose mobile OS. In iOS and Windows Phone, the software is catered directly to the hardware. Faster hardware does not mean you're going to ever notice an increase in speed inside the OS.

So when people say "yes, but can it match my dual core, 1.5Ghz, whatever else flagship Android phone?", the answer is simply "it doesn't matter". That's not a cop-out, that's not a defense, that's the truth. Windows Phone and iOS are built for their hardware and always run at a constant speed. It doesn't have bleeding edge hardware, but it doesn't need it in order to run as fast as a flagship Android phone.

It sounds like you're saying MS just didn't implement any features that would take advantage of faster hardware, which is kind of sad if true.

That's not really true - it makes full use of the hardware which is why a 1.4GHz single core ARM is fine :)

I'd go as far as saying that the software and hardware are at one with each other.

I can't think of much more that they would need to implement that their competitors are remotely close to having. They have multitasking, they have video, games, music, GPS, HTML5, maps, HD recording, forward facing cameras, Skype, etc.

It sounds like you're saying Android has something special that needs more hardware, which isn't true. The _base system_ needs faster hardware, because it's general purpose. An Xbox can run faster than Windows on the same hardware because it's designed for just one implementation.

In short, troll more.

Sorry, I was assuming gouranga was asking a genuine question. The question he was asking why these phones cost so much, while the Lumia 710 costs so little. And the reality is that the Lumias are running on hardware that time forgot, and better components cost more money. It's going to be cheaper to build a thick phone with a small battery, a slow processor, little ram and a small low resolution screen than it is to build something more modern. That's just the way things are, not a value judgement or a claim that everyone should have the latest and greatest phone.

So why does that 710 use low-end components? One reason is that it's positioned as low or mid-range device, competing against other cheap phones built from cheap components. Another is that there's not much wiggle-room in the WP7 hardware specs. You're going to have a screen of a certain resolution, a certain amount of RAM, a certain kind of Qualcomm SOC, etc.

Luckily for Nokia, in this case these reasons are well aligned. Unfortunately for them they're also forced to try to sell pretty much the same hardware in a different case as their flagship devices. (There are minor spec differences like the amount of flash or the exact technology used for the screen).

And yes, there are real benefits to the higher specs. For CPU perhaps not so much, but the quality of a screen is a huge selling point. A thinner phone is both a good selling point, and much more convenient to carry around. Extra RAM is always useful - on many mobile devices browsing is really frustrating compared to a desktop partly due to how little data can be cached. A better GPU can be a big deal when it comes to games (certainly Apple has managed to do well there). A phone with better specs is going to have a smoother upgrade path to newer versions of the OS.

And I don't see why WP7 phones would be exempt from this. For example, I find it hard to believe anyone could argue that at least some WP7 devices would not be much better with a higher resolution screen than the one mandated by MS. And of course the people buying a Lumia 900 now are going to be really pissed off when they can't upgrade to WP8 next fall due to being sold devices using a 2 year old spec.

The 710 is running on year-old components (which still manage to make a surprisingly decent phone); that helps drive the price down a bit. I paid HTC $500 for a phone with nearly identical components to the 710 over a year ago.

Hard to believe they're selling them at a loss. $400 is roughly what a Galaxy Nexus costs in European online stores if you ignore the VAT.

Because it's a developer phone. If the developers are all using the highest end devices they can't test how their app works on an average device, performance wise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com