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Comment by jcknight | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Nokia 3.1 as a lower end test device, which also belongs to the Android One program. The device is so slow to respond to input in every way that it's become the device I use to test our apps absolute worst case performance on.

Even knowing it was meant to be a lower end device it routinely gets frustrating to use for even the most simple tasks, such as Chrome tab switching, keyboard response and even just plain navigation.

We have had similar, buy not as bad, reactions to other low end device we use for testing.

I genuinely feel sorry for people who use these devices as their primary phones.

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I bought a few cheap (under $100) Nokia Lumias back when Nokia was Windows Phone's last, best hope, and it always annoyed me how a cheap Lumia with Windows Phone was in so many ways nicer to use than a mid-range Android phone -- much more responsive to input, less lag, etc.

Thanks to everything being AOT compiled using full optimizations with their cloud compiler, including .NET code.

Mostly Agree. But Microsoft fucked up both the desktop and mobile trying to make 1 operating system fit all.

Microsoft's latest revisions of the WinPhone were software engineering wise the best mobile phone OS on the planet. As you say, it was quick, silky smooth and yet ran on low end hardware with excellent battery life. I gather they achieved that buy tightly locking down how software developers could do things. Perhaps is why their app store was so thin which was major factor in their downfall, but still it was a remarkable effort. I take my hat off to that team.

It as even more remarkable because if you went back a few short years WinPhone was the worst phone OS on the planet. It crashed regularly, a misbehaving app could drain it's batter in no time, and the UI was horrible.

So much for "if you build a better mouse trap them will come" I guess, especially if your reputation is for making crap mousetraps.

> We have had similar, but not as bad, reactions to other low end device we use for testing

Let me guess -- Nexus 5X? I use one as my primary phone, and the slowness is noticeable but usually tolerable.

Hope you have it backed up, because they die sooner or later. For me it was sooner, for my friend it was later. Some soldering problem if I recall things right. A bootloop is the first (and sometimes the last sign).

I can confirm that. My Nexus 5X died with bootloop after the warranty was over and all the googling led me to make peace with the fact that it was a soldering issue, hence a manufacturing defect.

Yep same here, I didn't understand what went wrong at the time, but I did read here on HN a month or two ago that it was a known issue.

I do. This is my 2nd Nexus 5X from craigslist, but when this one dies I plan on replacing it with a Pixel 3a.

> Hope you have it backed up, because they die sooner or later

Tangential to your point, but is there anything useful that isn't backed up more or less by default in the standard Android workflow? I get that the privacy-concerned wouldn't use eg Google Photos, but they also likely heavily overlap with the set of people savvy enough to set up backup solutions for important data.

Plenty of apps can't be backed up (Google's TOTP App for example), at least in my experience, recovering from Android's native backup is just as good as dumping your SD card and having sync setup for applications that support it, which isn't a lot.

I've run Graphene or Lineage without gapps on most phones. So, no auto backups.

The 2.2 specs are better, with exception of RAM which is equivalent. I've never had any performance issues surfing, watching videos, or using apps. I couldn't recommend this phone enough. The review over at ars was good and that's what put it in my radar.

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