Show HN: BestChoice – Phone-chooser that even your grandma can use | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BestChoice – Phone-chooser that even your grandma can use

bestchoice.io

16 pointsarnaudsm28 comments

My grandma (age 80++) wants:

* A flip phone:

- People that are no longer very dexterous have a hard time with touch screen phones

- It's a phone - she will only be using it as a phone; all the touch screen features are just confusing

* An "SOS" button that texts / dials a list of family numbers for help if she has an emergency that doesn't warrant calling 911. Having dedicated memory dial keys is a passable compromise.

I ended up buying a Voca V530. I bought it just last week, so it is too soon to call it an unqualified success, but it looks like it will do the job we want it to do.

You're right ! I didn't include Flip Phones because they lack diversity and are pretty inexpensive. And people that buy flip phones usually don't search on the Internet websites like mine.

No, but people like that frequently depend on people like us who might visit such a site, and so therefore there is a big "friends and family" potential market that you are missing.

Choosing a phone has become too complicated in 2018, so I wanted to create something simple and objective to find the right device. No marketing gimmicks nor biased reviews. Just features and benchmarks, for real people.

Hope you'll enjoy it, would love your thoughts!

Here's the HN thread that gave me the idea : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14561498

This is a very minor point, but I just happened to be checking your site on a laptop with a 1366x768 screen. At this resolution, the "easy to use" button actually doesn't display the word "use" [0].

In the materialize.css file you're using, the xl breakpoint for the grid system begins at min-width: 1201px , and there doesn't seem to be a consideration for higher resolutions than that.

If you wanted to fix this, since 1366x768 is a fairly common resolution on things like Chromebooks and older laptops (i.e. the computers your target market is somewhat likely to be using) you could just remove the xl2 CSS classes from the divs containing each of the buttons. This would display the buttons in three columns even on higher resolutions, enabling users to see the full button text.

That might look pretty mad on bigger screens though; you could also change "easy to use" to "simple" and that would probably also solve the problem — but that'd be cheating.

Personally, I'd add in my own xxl media query for higher resolution screens. Working with materialize.css's existing media queries, it would look something like this [1].

After adding that media query to the CSS file (after the others or it won't work), I'd then change the xl2 CSS classes to xxl2, leaving m4, so that it would display the buttons in three columns unless a high enough resolution is used that can display all the button text in six columns.

(Obviously, you could also use flexbox and it would solve the aforementioned issue as well, but I guess if there's a demographic that is likely to be using a browser that doesn't support flexbox, it's the elderly.)

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/uJJKHvz.png

[1]: https://paste.sh/Axgmkd20#Q8zs4FfhQ_pbxrAzfUfSK9h8

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Besides that, cool site. I have a question though: are you adding each device manually to your own database, or will you be getting the data from somewhere in the future?

I ask because I find it difficult to believe that I cannot purchase an iPhone SE in the UK, for instance.

Thank you so much for the code ! I'm still new to Web Design, it's a big mistake for a lot of users indeed.

I'm getting the data legally from fonoapi.freshpixl.com , but the Speed and Camera Scores are calculated with some Python wizardry. There's still a few prices missing, I'm adding the iPhone SE UK right now !

No problem, it's a cool project and I wish you the best of luck going forward.

It looks very good. Things I noticed based on "even your granma can use it" (i'm using it on an iphone):

-there is a white "phones" word overlapped to everything on the top of the page, it should be fixed

-it's already been said inthink but long labels that don't fit in buttons are not displayed or only partially displayed

-even i don't get the logic of the first 4 buttons, i know my grandma would not find it intuitive: why the first 3 can be on simultaneously, but "best price" switches everything off? What's the deal there?

-I tried the drag price range thingie expecting it to be bad on a phone, and i was truly amazed by how smooth it is and the range->a to b range->single price transition. This being said, there is no reason why when a single price is selected, you are not able to move it around. You should check it up.. But you almost did it xD

Hope i'm helping

A very important thing you forgot and that a lot of people tend to not think about until it bites them in the ass are the available bands. Some of those Xiaomi phones for instance are amazing and cheap and intuitive, but that's not going to help you if it only works with a small subset of the bands used in your country and therefore you get a garbage signal everywhere.

I think speed and camera should be more intuitive. Speed doesn't actually make much sense, it could be divided into classes like social media, gaming etc. And what about phones not rated by Dxomark (assuming you have used their scores). Also, do you have your own rating framework for ease-of-use?

You're right, it's possible to distinguish media and gaming performance (ie with basemark OS and basemark X) but I want to keep things simple for the average user.

And yes I've extrapolated the camera Scores with my own rating framework based in ISO, exposure, noise, etc. All processing is done in Python!

If you're going to use speed as a distinguishing factor, you should be more clear on the site as to where that value is coming from. And you should be willing to expose the underlying data for those of us who might care.

Which benchmark(s) you use to judge the relative speed of one device against another one is actually quite important.

Is this open source? I'd be interested in seeing the implementation.

Other information to surface could include whether the device is on the latest OS, whether it gets timely updates, and whether it's available unlocked or only from carriers.

Do you have Sony devices in there?

It's not Open Source yet, the codebase is still too messy. Good old PHP/SQL/Jquery Stack and parsing is done in Python.

Thanks for the tips, I'm working on career selection features! Also the OS and updates are mentioned in the descriptions. You can even select brands with good Update support in the "More Features" menu.

There are a few Sony devices, you can select them in >more features>Brands>Sony. I'm still adding more devices !

Indeed, what is the latest version of the OS available for that platform, on a carrier-by-carrier basis.

The same device on Verizon might have a very different "latest" version of the OS as compared to another carrier.

Awesome interface

I wish we could have something like this for laptops.

Maybe when you cleanup the code and open source it, someone (maybe I) could clone it and implement one for laptops

That'd be incredibly useful.

Even though it's hard to repertory all variations of each laptop (10 on average), it's the next item on my todo-list. Thanks for the proposition !

You might want to get in touch with notebookcheck.net, they have the exact data you would need for that. I don't think they'll give it to you, but who knows, if you impress them enough with the phone chooser you might be able to strike a collaboration.

That could potentially end up with a very useful product.

Awesome website! I love it. My girlfriend loves. Should get a YouTube guy to review it for you. Get some good traffic. Keep up on it and always improve!

A cool feature would be compare. Just make sure the ux is simple. Always hate pain in the ass compare features.

How about voice quality? It's a phone!!!

Voice quality is pretty much always the same on gsm networks.. I did not find any metrics on the subject.

Depends on the codecs that are used, and the bands available. Some devices might not have more recent codecs, and therefore might sound worse.

Other devices might have newer "HD voice" codecs available, and could sound totally different.

Please add the OnePlus brand :)

You can select it in More features>Brands>OnePlus ;)

no moto g?

Phones appear according to availability in your country, I'm adding more links!

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