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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I jumped ship earlier. I had the Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Nexus (which was a horrible phone) and then jumped to an iPhone 5. It's hard to find hardware as consistently good as the iPhone and after the redesign from 12 onward it's been really great (I wish they'd keep the mini around).

I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?

Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.

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Galaxy Nexus was a great phone at the time for the price. I had just gotten the galaxy 2 then realized that sprint had no coverage in Portland so I cancelled my contract (didn’t have to pay because I proved they mislead there coverage area). Moved to a GN on T-Mobile and loved it until I replaced it with a nexus 5x. GN was a good little phone to learn android dev on as well.

I really disliked the hardware, battery life was awful for me even after replacing it with their extended size OEM battery.

It felt like cheap plastic crap too (imo).

The iPhone 5 was the first iOS phone with turn by turn nav and LTE which were the reasons I stuck with the Nexus phones as each one got worse. The 5's battery life was also ridiculously good in comparison and the hardware design holds up even now ten years later.

The HTC Nexus One was the best of the first three, I'm not sure why Samsung gets so much love for hardware. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus builds were both ugly and poor. The Nokia N9 was beautiful and I was bummed when Microsoft turned them into windows only devices, they would have been great android phones.

Nokia phones were really beautiful up until their bitter end.

I like them now. I'm using some $300 Nokia and its nice. Big clear screen, surfs the web just fine. Can make calls and texts. That's all I use my phone for.

The GN was meant to be a budget phone for developers to jump into Android. It wasn’t meant to be the best phone. Samsung offered the Galaxy 2 at that time that was much better. The GN cost $350 no contract which was unheard of at the time.

The Nexus phones were the only ones that shipped pure android without a lot of OEM crapware installed you couldn't remove (Samsung's "Touchwiz").

That was another thing at the time which pushed me away from android, they didn't have control over their OS because of this lack of control over hardware.

It was a little like Windows and all the crap that came installed on it, except worse because you couldn't even reset it.

I've had an Android phone since the TMobile 3G (second ever Android phone) and I'm starting to seriously consider an iPhone.

I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.

I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.

I think the iphone SE is under $500. I used an apple iphone 8 up until this Christmas. The iphone SE is basically a slightly upgraded iphone 8 which i think has 1 more gb of ram or something.

I will sometimes just buy a model or 2 back used or refurbished since they last for quite a while. You could probably get the 11 for under $500 as well.

iPhone SE is $400 (64GB) and $450 (128GB):

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se

>I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.

I migrated to Android back in the IPhone 8 and IPhone 10 Max Plus++ whatever era. I just couldn't deal with a $1000 phone.

But now Apple has the IPhone SE which goes for as low as $399.

You can get a lot of used iPhone for $500. I bought my XS maybe 3 years ago for a little less than 500€. I’m still using it. The battery starts to age but not enough for a replacement (it generally finishes the day but I have no more extra buffer). Other than that, I can’t imagine what could make me buy anything else.

I would totally love an iPhone mini because i find the Xs too big but i don’t feel like it’s worth spending money. I would also totally buy a non-googled Android (because I don’t like nowadays Apple mentality) that I could keep updated for years but it just doesn’t exists.

So here I am, with my Xs, which honestly, feels like, to me, an exceptional phone for 2022: beautiful, fast, updated, nice picture quality, reliable, and totally cheap. It would be a total dream if the App Store wasn’t a dictature or if side loading was possible.

Ah, same here. I really like the positives the iphone seems to have, but can't justify buying a phone that's as expensive as they are to myself, and then still be bogged down with consciously user-hostile design choices like no headphone jacks, sd card slots or app-sideloading. Sucks, because everything else about iOS is super cool and well thought-out IMO.

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