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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod, and camera phones sucked until the iPhone. The idea that product quality, ease of use, UX/UI, or polish doesn't matter is just wrong. This thing is absolutely going to bomb (reminds me of GoPro's Karma) and I'd bet money on it, but SNAP stock is already in dire straits, so their incompetence is probably priced in.

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> Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod

Just being able to download music from the internet was already a game changer, it didn't suck! Before that if you wanted to hear a song from an album you didn't have at hand and you wanted it RIGHT NOW, you had to call into a radio station and ask nicely for another human being you've never met to play it for the entire city.

Waiting 60 minutes to download "Stairway to Heaven - LIVE rip" by "Guns N Roses and Bob Marley and U2 and Green Day" was a privilege.

I’m arguing the opposite of what you think I am. MP3s won because you could download and throw a gazillion of them on a portable device, cell phone cameras won because they were always on you. If this thing wins it’ll be because it’s cheap, you can swap the battery fast enough to make up for the shitty battery life, and the ux is simple enough that people who don’t care about drones can get drone shots. I’m completely on your side - the technical specs don’t matter if the UX is right.

> Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod, and camera phones sucked until the iPhone.

What is this, alternate history?

I mean who cares about the stock, they have 5B in annual revenue, 58% gross margin, they’re cash flow positive, and spent 1.5B in R&D last year. Snapchat and Discord are the messaging apps.

By basically every measure they’re extremely successful and following the Google strat of their main advertising business finding moonshots.

Camera phones sucked until iPhone 4 at least.

No, camera phones were very good since the Sony Ericsson days - ~2006.

I have a book from that era all about mobile camera photography, written by a professional photographer, and illustrated only with pictures shot on a Nokia phone. The pictures are of excellent printable quality with amazing colors.

~nobody used the Sony Ericsson devices though, everyone had stuff like the Motorola Razr with terrible little cameras in them.

I had SE k800i in 2006. It had a Xenon flash and the photos it took we not surpassed by smartphones for a surprisingly long time, especially at night.

It was extremely popular brand in Europe for many years. At one time almost everybody had a good Nokia or Sony Ericsson. I saw Motorola Razr like one time in the wild.

Well, I speak from an American perspective and the Razr was everywhere, but according to Wikipedia their peak was around 10% market share. Nokia was much much more popular.

America was way behind at that point.

IIRC a combination of weird regional roaming agreements, odd incompatible networks and the sheer size of the country leading to lots of coverages blackspots meant that the US just didn't get widespread adoption of decent mobile tech.

Yeah, that makes the iPhone hype much more sensible. I remember it as very much underwhelming, I had a phone like that 2 years before it came out, and it had apps.

Can I ask what the name of the book is?

https://www.megaknihy.cz/foto-video/22886-fotime-mobilem.htm...

Can't find it at home to provide some scans, sorry :-/

My Sony K750i from 5 years earlier was phenomenal. Only 2mp resolution but the lens was brilliant and I've still got a bunch of photos I printed from it that still stand up to scrutiny.

I think at that period the US was way behind the rest of the world on mobile tech. I remember people in a phone shop in New York being really impressed with it.

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