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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Yet another phone with Android Go edition, four very slow Cortex-A53 cores (https://www.unisoc.com/en_us/home/TZNSJ-9832E-7), 2GB of RAM (https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-key/specs?sku=1GS009MPG3001), 2GB of “virtual RAM” (swap space)…

Destined to become immediate e-waste like all the other phones in its class. Wanna bet that it can only run 32-bit apps despite having a 64-bit CPU, because it's so memory-starved? That's extremely common in this segment.

The “Upgrade without overspending” pitch is rather bizarre considering that the specs on low-end phones seemingly do not change. Five years ago they were selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, today they are selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, in five years the phone manufacturers will have somehow continued twisting Google's hand to be able to continue selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM.

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I truly feel sorry for those that will use this phone for anything that is not just calling and writing sms. I've had relatives with slow phones, and especially if old and not tech savvy, they click, wait, click again because nothing happened. Then, the feedback of the first click arrives, but the 2nd click will now click something different because what is being displayed has now changed. So they go back, but it's so slow they have to wait and press back again (...). And so, the eternal cycle of slow mobile phones restarts

> I truly feel sorry for those that will use this phone for anything that is not just calling and writing sms.

Phones in this class will freeze every other time they're receiving a call, so they're hardly suitable for even that.

In my eyes, these phones should be labeled as not suitable for advertised use and shouldn't be allowed to be sold in civilized world, as to protect the poorest from psychological damage they can cause. I'm serious. My first Android phone was like that, and it's depression through thousand papercuts.

The cores aren't slow so much as software was designed for more powerful devices. It's a shame, really.

Four cores, each with more computing power then existed in the known universe when I was born.

Executing more bloat, than all of the code that existed when you were born

My experience with HMD ("Nokia") phones has been that they've come quite bloat-free from the factory. There are the Google apps (because no normal Android user outside of maybe China would buy a phone without those) but other than that the ROM has always been very clean.

If you load it up with Tiktok and Instagram and whatever else likes to run in the background all the time, it'll certainly be bogged down, but HMD phones themselves are normally clean when you buy them*

*=unless you buy them through a carrier which customises the OS, like people in the US often seem to choose for some reason. But that's because the carrier loads those phones with bloat, not because HMD does.

Interesting, which HMD models have you used and have you used Spotify or Youtube with bluetooth headphones on them? I wonder how they perform.

The Cortex-A53 is certainly a respectable processor within its design constraints. It is from 2012, and I think it is either the smallest or the second-smallest implementation of AArch64 that Arm have designed. It is very power-efficient, and that was the design goal. You definitely can make an SoC that only has “efficiency” cores, and it can even run Android, but putting it in a smartphone indicates that pure manufacturing cost is your only design consideration.

What happened to RAM use? Ignoring gaming (which a large sunbset of the market never ever does), phones these days are doing exactly the same things they were doing back when 512MB was considered a generous amount of RAM. It feels as if Google deliberately ended all RAM frugality in platform updates to get ever bigger ad delivery machines into pockets.

Most of my phone's RAM is going towards Firefox and maybe a few messengers that stay resident. The rest is all cache just in case I want to switch back to an app I opened yesterday.

Running Android on 512MB is a thing of the past but if websites could stop bloating themselves up with Javascript modules and megabytes of images, this phone would probably be fine as a daily driver for someone who doesn't use their phone all that often.

Like a raspberry pi 3?

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