Hacker News Reader

Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't wait long enough, so I got a Huawei Ascend D1 Quad. It out specs almost every phone in the market. The brand is virtually unknown, so they threw everything on this quad-core 1.5GHz machine.

It upgraded itself Android 4.0.4, and it's jailbroken by default.

It bests the IPhone5 and Nexus on specs, and costs $200 less than either.

View on HN

"It bests the IPhone5 and Nexus on specs"

No it doesn't. Benchmarks lower than HTC One X, disappointing btty life, etc. [1].

"and costs $200 less than either."

No it doesn't. $425 off contract [2], which is $200 cheaper than the iphone but is $100 more than the Nexus 4. This is perhaps a defensible claim if you got it free on your carrier but that's a blanket statement that won't apply to most people.

[1] http://www.slashgear.com/huawei-ascend-d1-quad-xl-review-152...

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/huawei-ascend-d1-quad/45...

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3293286/huawei-ascend-d1-qu...

It looks like this phone was a world beater when it was announced in Feb 2012 and I'm sure it's still a solid phone but it's not going to win any best in show awards today.

It costs $200 less than the Nexus 4? Where can I buy it off-contract for $199?

Yeah, best price I can find is $489 on eBay.

Nexus goes for $600+ in Australia, IPhone $750.

I bought my Ascend for $425 from JB Hifi

My Nexus 4 was $350 straight from Google, unlocked and unsubsidized.

shrug

There is where the dollar symbol is less than useful. USD != AUD.

$350 USD, sorry.

Current exchange rate is 1.00 AUD = 1.05045 USD, though, so the AUS price is still wacky high.

damn you lucky. Other places that have stock have jacked the price up to $550 or so.

I'm assuming it means compared to the on contract N4s.

The brand is virtually unknown

I would say they are fairly well known in the US... for selling net work gear with back doors for the Chinese government.

Mostly I kid, I work next to some of their offices in Dallas they have so so Chinese food in their cafeteria.

That's great, and I love that Huawei can bring such specs at quite a low price point. But specs aren't everything. How is the UI responsiveness? Does the phone itself feel sturdy? I keep thinking there must be something wrong with it, but it might just be some irrational sense of "you get what you pay for".

A lot of people around here have that irrational sense. It took a while for me to shake it off, but I'm glad I did.

It's not entirely irrational though... looking at two identically-specced products I would choose the one with a higher build quality, which is often more expensive. So there is some correlation. Doesn't mean that more expensive always means better quality though.

The one killer feature a Nexus device has for me is that they are the first devices to get Android updates pushed to them when major updates arrive.

That ``jailbroken by default" thing really amuses me. It's very Chinese :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com