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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

In the last 5 years, an obscure Chinese company called Transsion, selling brands like Tecno, Infinix and Itel, has quietly become the largest mobile phone maker in Africa. Why? Because their phone cameras are tuned out of the box to work well with dark skin.

https://qz.com/africa/1633699/transsions-tecno-infinix-camer...

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Looking at their demo real cor the Camon 18 camera, this seems like the perfect example of universal design. It capture beautifully color-balanced dark skin, and does so right along side pale skin and vibrant colors.

Wow: no notch, edge to edge screen, side mounted fingerprint scanner, face unlock, stabilized video, 3.5mm audio jack, USB C port…

And the list price in the Philippines is US$190.

Great hardware and competent design, apparently.

I won't trust the software too much, sadly. Say, Xiaomi used to make beautiful smartphones, and was also found to have spying and remote control code in the firmware.

I don't think that the smartphone makers are evil; the state forces their hand even if they aren't.

> I won't trust the software too much, sadly.

Yours is a very reasonable stance. And for exactly the same reasons, you should trust android and ios software just the same: not too much.

not to go too deep, but there is a qualitative difference behind the sort of "suspicion that everything is spying on you" and "it is very clearly legislated and discussed that certain spying is happening on devices X/Y/Z".

It's the difference between "let's use signal to communicate" while using an android or like... "let's go over this through email" when taking notes on a criminal conspiracy. Sure, your unpatched android probably has spyware on it too, signal might have issues, but you're guaranteed to have a lot of trouble with emails sitting on some server.

I see what you want to say. But to be honest, from a personal point of view as an european with an irrelevant job, I'm very much less concerned of being spied on by China or Russia than by Google or Facebook. I'm sure the "western" companies are much more likely to betray me to a suddenly hostile local government.

right; the local russian and chinese governments are hostile already and don’t need to betray themselves.

... And a forked kernel with binary blobs that won't ever be upgradable to the next version!

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