Nearly 500 brands exited smartphone market during 2017-2023
counterpointresearch.com
counterpointresearch.com
Amazon: "We're talking top brands here, like FLORGOO, REMPLOW, BARBENTRON, ZOLIMIO"
Customer: "Those really dont sound like real companies, Amazon"
Amazon: "But they kindof do though, you can see how those might be company names"
Customer: "I guess?"
Sadly, I fear that I won't be able to find those shorts again to buy any more pairs, because of the way these brands pop up and then go away again so quickly.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Doogee-S55-Smartphone-Review.3...
I'll almost certainly pick up another ~$200 rugged Chinese-made phone to replace it....that or some hardware that supports postmarketOS.
You've got a great set of Kumho tires, do really want to risk wearing them out with those Dickass brakes?
It literally means "turd".
I mean, it is French, the 5th most spoken language in the world, and France is Germany's neighbor. There is no way Audi could have missed that.
Different cultures regard different things as professional.
> Small brands capitalized on the market’s transition from 2G to 3G/4G, benefitting from strong entry-tier demand, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
this is not a net plus game. Catering to Americans might mean catering less to other cultures.
Hmm.
In particular, check out numbers 5, 20, 29, 32-36, and very specifically, number 40, should interest you. (See 24-27 if you take umbrage at the applicability of the previous set of rules.)
* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
> 8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
Pirahã are an example, they change their names at whim and everyone else accepts this.
Imagine applying to Amazon US with a "General Electronics" brand of stoves. It wouldn't up them to decide if they get a listing or not on the site.
OR, they don't care.... American centrism on HN is so bad
Hell, I'd probably buy a Zolimo Barbertron just FOR the name!
Even more modern company names are kinda like that... Anker, DJI, Haier, Dalian Wanda, Kagi, Vercel, Nexon, Plex, Splunk, Zyxel, Sonos, Zynga, Hulu, Etsy, Yandex...
Maybe if they just used a better random name generator with a better appreciation for English phonemes, we'd never know the difference lol.
These all started as the equivalent of Amazon brands and went legit after getting a reputation for relative quality. Anker especially
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Group
Edit: Actually, I don't think DJI and Haier were Amazon brands either. DJI was bootstrapped by a college kid's family after transitioning from selling electronic parts. Haier was in SE Asia before the US.
Anker was though. Along with Aukey, RavPower, Mpow... some of those were eventually kicked off though, I think.
Please don't use LLMs to post on here. There need to be at least a minimum of truth or facts when posting.
Lenovo - the new thing; Asus, Volvo - vaguely anatomical in English, but actually from pegasus and "I roll" in Latin; Nintendo - 任天堂 might mean something in Japanese; Samsung - 삼성/三星 "three stars" in Korean; IKEA - IK is from founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials, EA more obscurely from his home farm and village;
Anker - big and heavy "anchor", appropriate for power adapters; Kagi - means "key" in Japanese; Nexon - from Nexus, their (still running!) 1996 MMORPG; Plex - from multiplex or cineplex; Sonos - from sound; Hulu - sounds like "hula" but apparently from Mandarin; Etsy - from "etc.", implying you can find "everything else"; Yandex - Yet Another + (network) Index.
They seem to be fairly sensible names for the most part.
Back in 2000/1, I had such trouble taking them seriously, with that name and that colourful logo, I was like, whuuuut? But then I started using it and obviously it was miles ahead of everything else. That taught me a good lesson on whether you need a clever brand name or not. The product makes the brand name, not the other way around.
(These days he would probably get reported to HR.)
I believe there was a youtube minidoc from the wendover productiont type channel on this.
They basically hoped that vendors would respond by going through the enormous effort to get a high-value trademark for something like a "Quality Appliances" brand, expending an enormous amount of discovery and legal fees (or just being a pre-existing well-known brand like KitchenAid[TM] or General Electric[TM]. That trademark would be so valuable that they would never risk importing lead-contaminated aluminum cookware and tarnishing their image, they'd implement strict quality control, fight back against counterfeiters using their likeness, and otherwise be a reliable vendor for Amazon. Right?
Wrong. It's basically free and instant to file for a trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] kitchen products, because it's not a word or even a substring of a word that anyone would want to trademark. So the vendors did that, submitted their valid trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] to the Amazon Brand Registry, and imported the cheapest junk that they could build. And then consumers sorted by "price low to high" and a bought CHUKOFAZ mixer instead of KitchenAid, and raged at Amazon and the CPSC, because the CHUKOFAZ brand had ceased to exist, and the product page they'd bought from was now a HAKLBUC-brand backpack with 2500 5-star reviews praising how well it mixed cookie dough.
Barbentron is a quality brand. You know that because it has a pronounceable name and the "tron" has connotations of advanced technology.
Hope somebody writes a book about them.
(It could have also been a reflection of where I was in life. I was firmly in my fun years, moved cities twice, and met my wife with that phone. I wonder if there are going to be people in the future similarly nostalgic for, I don't know, the Samsung Galaxy A9 because it's what they took to college.)
For me, my all-time favorite was the Danger Hiptop II/SideKick II. No phone since then has ever been so much fun.
Part of the issue then was touchscreens were still pretty bad in terms of accuracy and sensitivity, and screens were small, so if you wanted to type something fast you needed a physical keyboard. Today I feel like I could do the same with any 6" phone with the on-screen keyboard.
Even Samsung has been way more cautious and tame with their designs, excluding the Folding devices which are true innovations.
What's wrong with these options?
How so? Comparing [1] and [2] shows the geekbench scores between the fairphone 5 and the pixel 7 are pretty similar.
> missing some fundamental quality of life stuff that other phones have offered, usually for years
I'd argue that statement is backwards: the non-mainstream phones have been offering quality of life stuff that the mainstream phones have abandoned years ago, namely user-expandable storage via microsd cards and user-replaceable battery.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1891321
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/google-pixel-7
As per how they compare, reviews of the FP5 seem to say it has the following deficiencies:
* Poor display - bad brightness, which hurts outdoor usability
* Bad battery life, even considering the wimpy processor
* Underwhelming performance, which will make it feel sluggish faster
* Mediocre speaker performance
* Mediocre cameras
You're paying a whole lot, in my view, for something that has an easily replaceable battery... which is something you might do maybe once in the life of the device? If you're keeping a phone longer than 5-6 years, I suspect performance of the chipset is going to become a big issue. Additionally, with the bad battery life/performance already, it'll incentivize you to want to upgrade even sooner.
As someone who used a Galaxy S3 for over a decade and has now "upgraded" to a friend's old S9, I can't understand this at all. What kind of quality of life stuff am I missing out on? I'm missing having a removable battery, but at least it has a sd card.
In summary though, it's a phone that has 1-3 year old performance metrics at nearly-flagship pricing.
I'd take a removable battery all things being equal, but it seems abundantly clear that FP5 would be making compromises in device performance compared to current flagships. That tradeoff just isn't worth it to me. Maybe it is to you.
I'd love to pay like $500 for a pinephone with hardware from 3-4 years ago.
The value argument is valid of course, but much like PCs, major phone manufacturers get a lot of their profit from bundling crapware so it's inevitable for one that doesn't to cost more.
Nothing wrong with the fairphone, though, I've been happy with it.
The smartphone market gets less and less diverse.
I had a friend on that trip have a perfectly working iPhone 5 throughout the trip and it finally got me to bite the bullet and try an iPhone. That led to me trying out a Mac and now I am completely in the Apple ecosystem after 15+ years of switching back and forth between Windows and Linux and probably never looking back. So thanks Google, you got me to abandon not only Android but also Windows/Linux. Hell after the LG Nexus 5 mess, I also avoid LG from now on.
Then AirPods came out and they worked with my Samsung note, but I got an iPhone at upgrade time. 5 years later and I’ve just got my second iPhone and my house is fully in the Apple ecosystem.
The “how do we?” Or “can you setup this” have effectively stopped from my wife and kids.
> the decline in the number of active brands is coming largely from local brands
> small brands have been largely dependent on white-label devices
I'm not suggesting there haven't been some notable big historical innovators who have either completely left the market or are only shells of their former selves. LG, Nokia, HTC, were all big players who used to be innovation leaders in the space who either aren't in the market anymore or in Nokia's case just makes solid midrange phones instead of any big innovations.
But yeah, it seems like a large chunk of this drop is just local brands that stuck their own stickers on a white label phone, maybe did a little bit of localization work, stuck it in their own box and sold it as their own device. Maybe some people lost a little bit of local flavor, but I doubt much innovation was lost with most of these brands.
11 pro to 15 pro.
My wife asked what was new/changed. I said “it’s exactly he same and I like that, but it has usb c, better cameras and battery life and the screens a hit different but it’s still my exact phone setup”
Which is boring, but I kind of like it.
Before I moved from android I loved getting a new phone that was different, then I would root it if no could install custom launchers or OS’s. That was part of the fun and definitely not boring, but I actually like this kind of boring and I don’t think we will see Apple do anything crazy until they make some sort of foldable.
You know because they’re brave.
They’re “finished” products. I don’t expect massive innovation going forward, just slow, incremental changes.
One day, we may have the phones from The Expanse, but for right now, an iPhone 15 or a Galaxy S23 or a Pixel 7 are as good as they need to be.
Other than that, most everything has been very incremental (faster, longer, light, high resolution, brighter, polish) since pretty much the mid 2000s.
Some are even going so far as to call themselves flip phones.
I talk and text on it. Maybe a grocery list or looking up a price in a store. If I want to do more I have bigger devices.
Technology and of course human eyes, hands, and heads. There's a lower limit to the length of a phone and still have the capability of a phone which is the mean distance between peoples' ears and mouths. You also can't make a phone too small or else the screen won't be readable.
Even if you could get the iPhone 15's electronics to fit a chip the size of a grain of rice the body of the phone needs to fit a head and needs a screen for an interface. The antenna would still need to be sized such to be tuned for the right cellular frequencies.
That's not to say candy bar phones are the perfect form factor. It's just ergonomics and physics will play a part in devices no matter how compact the technology.
Phones will be even less forgiving of niche business models. If you can't design a titanium case, or try (and fail, and absorb the loss) to monopolize the supply of very large sapphire crystals, you can't play in phones.
A screen can work fine with a crack or a dozen, but a cracked camera lens? Game over.
Ignore Apple entirely (since you can't make a phone with that chip) and Qualcomm and MediaTek are probably make up significantly >50% of the market. Samsung and who else make buyable chips?
More to the point of this submission, isn't it amazing how hard it is to get a phone smaller than 5.9" diagonal? It just isn't done. The market itself has set, has picked a couple things it wants to do, and doesn't try anything else.
There are more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. Not all of these companies had their own foundries, by the way. Cyrix just designed the chips, they were fabbed somewhere else.