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Comment by gwicks56 | Hacker News Reader

The nostalgia factor of these for people who owned one years ago, and are now earning enough to waste money on one will be high.

Not going to lie, I want one, even though I appreciate my Pixel 3 camera nearly every day, and this has a rubbish camera.

It is good to finally see some innovation occurring in the Android hardware space however, although it remains to be seen how the software will cope.

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I miss small phones with buttons that do a few features in highly productive manner (unlike the full attention, full fingers smartphone era). It might be a foot in the door.

I'd love to get it just coz it's cool to have a flip phone in 2019 that is actually a smartphone!

And half the size of other phones. Presumably less breakable in a drop. Less likely to snap in a pocket. Less limelt to scratch when not in use. This seems like a good form facator if they can fix the price.

How many phones have you snapped in your pocket?

Not quite snapped, but I did lose the capacitive touch layer on my Nexus 5x sitting with it in my back pocket. Repaired it myself, during which I also managed to wreck the battery. ("Juicyfruit" smell... Definitely broke a cell.) So then I buy a new battery. Then the stupid thing bootloops a few months later, literally as I'm putting it in airplane mode leaving for a business trip. Not having a cell phone during a business trip is not fun at all.

The issue where they die randomly is IMO the only flaw with that phone.

I'd still be using mine otherwise. I went back to my Lumia 920 backup phone. Seven years old and the only thing wrong with it is no app updates in forever. I really wish the whole Windows Phone and Nokia partnership had a different ending.

The Pixel(1,2,...) is basically a heavier metal-frame Nexus 5X without the bug that afflicts Nexus 5Xs. Not a fan of the added weight but the OS is almost perfect.

I've crushed an xcover 271: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_xcover_271-3415.php

Crushing this thing is actual an achievement

Okay how can... backstory?

I was visiting family. Phone was OK when I put it in the pocket, hopped on my bicycle, and rode back home. Next morning, I pulled a turned-off phone with shattered screen out of my pants' pocket. I no longer got a picture on the screen and it didn't seem to react at all to blind typing.

Pants are made with pockets on the part you sit on, and people insist on using these pockets for some reason

That also partly explains the expensive prices of Supreme streetwear, coveted by a customer base who is now old enough to actually buy limited edition skater clothing.

> seen how the software will cope.

Honestly I could give two shits about all these hardware gimmicks. I wish mobile ARM devices had some standard BIOS or UEFI or something. Only Microsoft forced their manufacturers to use UEFI and no one really uses devicetree.

I care more about being able to take a new device and install what I want on it, just like any off the shelf PC laptop and being able to install Linux.

PostmarketOS is making some big pushes, but the mobile space is missing the hardware compatibility that enthusiasts need to run things that aren't Google/Apple tracking devices.

There just aren't enough hobbyist in this market to demand that standardization. Linux got big because it could run on a lot of the standard hardware out there. In the mobile space, we need custom devices like the PinePhone and Libbrem 5 (that don't exist yet) just to get the same kind of freedom.

The fact that there are a ton of devices out there that should be more than capable and powerful enough to be really good mobile devices, but that are crippled by the newer versions of Google services that slow them to a fucking crawl, is really screwed up and wasteful.

Boot being nonstandard isn't really an issue. It's certainly a bit silly but it's never really stopped anything. It's the choice to disable user modification to booting that is the problem. That and hardware support being based on outdated binary blobs. Neither of these are solved by making a device use UEFI.

You can keep this phone in your pocket without worrying that your car keys with scratch the face. There are many advantages to a flip phone.

Not to mention the lack of glass covering the screen means a screen protector in general is likely unnecessary. No hassle of dealing with stupid air bubbles or the inevitable edge chipping of the protector (which is somehow always way weaker than the screen itself anyhow)

You can already do that. Phone faces are orders of magnitude harder than metal keys. It's usually dirt in your pocket that scratches phones, and if a piece of dirt is on the screen when it flips closed then it will still most certainly scratch.

Did you see the "Retro Razr" mode image at the bottom of the article? Even better nostalgia factor!

I want to buy a phone with a good camera and I'm even considering stuff iphones for 1k$. Is the pixel 3 good from your personal experience?

The Pixel3a has the same camera and is cheaper. Look up comparisons between the top end phones and the 3a and they're extremely close.

It has the same camera as the pixel 3, but no separate fixed zoom or wide imaging unit like in newer phones. It has the same CPU as the pixel 2, which can be pokey. All the computational imaging features in the pixel 4 are not in the pixel 3a.

The pixel 3a does not have the same camera as the new iPhones.

My favourite phone to date. Always been an Android user though

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