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Comment by Lord-Jobo | Hacker News Reader

A few were, definitely. LG stands out as the biggest innovator to leave the market. Less competition in the android market is a problem, in my view. Most people's interests are covered between Pixel and Samsung, true. But what happens when google gets greedy and decides to lock the Pixel bootloader? Where the hell will people who want a privacy oriented phone go? stuck with pinephone or fairphone?

Even Samsung has been way more cautious and tame with their designs, excluding the Folding devices which are true innovations.

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Not to mention picking a Pixel phone has always meant making hardware choices you may or may not find acceptable. It used to mean being stuck with a muddy POLED display and bizarre hardware issues that crop up four months in. Now it means a Tensor chip that consistently underperforms its Snapdragon counterpart and whose poor Mali drivers essentially keep you from any kind of serious game emulation.

The smartphone market gets less and less diverse.

Interesting to see Google is still up to their old nonsense. I bought every Nexus phone but the Nexus 5 failed me really badly in my first overseas trip. Battery was constantly draining doing nothing, terrible bugs with the GPS module and right before I left I updated my non rooted stock OS to the latest version only to discover the hard way that they introduced a bug that completely broke video recording. I only discovered when I came back home and all my videos were filled with muddled audio. Ruined multiple priceless moments.

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.

It was AirPods for me, I was fully android and chrome os (pixelbook), windows on my work machine.

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.

I think half of the world can still use Huawei or Xiaomi

> stuck with pinephone or fairphone?

What's wrong with these options?

Compared to a pixel, they're budget phone specs missing some fundamental quality of life stuff that other phones have offered, usually for years. The fairphone 5 seems a bit closer to flagship specs, but it still clearly misses the mark and also seems priced at flagship levels. Pinephone is just a junk budget phone, although at least it's priced much lower.

> The fairphone 5 [...] still clearly misses the mark

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

For Fairphone, you're comparing against a Pixel 7 - which is a last year phone. Compare against the Galaxy S23, which has a Geekbench score that is ~50% higher than the FP5. Compared to iPhones it's even worse.

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.

> fundamental quality of life stuff

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.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37615789

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.

The cameras are way behind.

I guess. But at least the cameras are not going to AI hallucinate non-existent details.

They're way, way too cheap and low-spec to even consider as a daily driver.

I'd love to pay like $500 for a pinephone with hardware from 3-4 years ago.

As someone still daily driving a Pixel 4A, I'm curious as to what people need from their phones that hardware from 3 years ago can't provide. Newer phones have better cameras, but otherwise it seems like they just do the same things a little bit faster.

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.

I replaced my Pixel 2 XL only after I cracked the display twice and CalyxOS ended support. That, and a too good to refuse offer for Pixel 7 from my carrier. Still have the old one around as back up, as it works perfectly fine, as it did before.

Aside from the camera which I use less and less I'm still happy with my OnePlus 7T from 2019 which I bought second hand. I did upgrade from a OnePlus 3T which I bought new in 2016.

The PinePhone, yes, but the FairPhone is keeping up. My FairPhone 4 is a great daily driver. Are you confusing the FairPhone with something else?

The pinephone is just not a contender. It still can't reliably wake up from sleep on an incoming call. The SMS subsystem gets 'stuck' and you stop getting messages.

Nothing wrong with the fairphone, though, I've been happy with it.

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