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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

Yup. I upgraded to a Nexus 4 from a Nexus S recently and the Nexus 4 is a much nicer device and the Android experience is great: fast, smooth & pretty. It has to be hands down the best value smartphone on the market at this price (it was already great value at $100 more).

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Best value of well known brands perhaps. You get various Chinese brand ~5" phones with 1920x1080 resolution, 16GB ROM for that price or less now. And those are typicall dual sim, and take 32GB SD-cards too.

Build quality for most of them are probably not as quite high as the Nexus 4, but the one I have at least is very well built.

Who sells these? I would like a cheap ultra phone.

http://www.lightinthebox.com/c/android-cell-phones_3309

None of them are 1920x1080.

Nor are any available with 2G DRAM, which is a big part of the N4's great interactive performance.

In fact, if you limit the search on that site to 1G phones with Jellybean and 4.6-5" displays, you get a lot of units with prices significantly higher than the new price of the N4. And the ones that are cheaper seem pretty universally inferior (e.g. 480x800 screen, minimal internal flash, etc...)

Tons of resellers on aliexpress.com. Note that they are shipped direct from China, so reading feedback is essential. You can also find some that sell via Amazon marketplace.

Where can I see pictures of the phone(s) you're talking about?

Just a couple of brands:

http://en.thl.com.cn/

http://en.zopomobile.com/

http://europe.oppostyle.com/

http://www.ejiayu.com/en/

Here you can find other name for searching (no affiliation whatsoever with this shop, I don't even know if they sell in US, it's only the place where a couple of friends bought their chinese smartphone): http://www.grossoshop.net/Smartphone_Dual_Sim_Android_Proces...

try alibaba.com

Just curious, but what version of Android does your phone run? Have there been updates/is there an ETA for 4.3?

4.1. No upgrades, and I don't expect any, though there are custom roms (haven't bothered, though I have rooted it - most of these phones are beyond trivial to root). Essentially I'm expecting to upgrade every year, as e.g. in a year it's gone from about $230 for my dual core phone with 1280x720 to about the same for a quad core with 1920x1080 with more memory etc., so I don't really care if there are few or no upgrades for the phone - the reduction in my contract compared to getting an expensive brand phone easily pays down the phone in 6-8 months.

If you intend to keep a phone even at this price range for more than 1-2 years, you'll want to do your research both regarding build quality and upgrades. Though the brands with regular upgrades and "premium" build quality, like Xiaomi, are also pretty much as expensive as e.g. Samsung.

How is updatability? Will you be able to update it in a few years from now?

Who cares? Part of the reason why I've taken to buying these is that they're cheap enough that I can justify upgrading once a year or so.

(But yes, don't expect to get much in terms of upgrades from the manufacturer. Your mileage may wary, but the ones that do upgrade regularly, like Xiaomi, are also expensive high end brands - Xiaomi wants very much to be the "Chinese Apple" for example)

Would you mind writing up a review? I'm interested to see how they hold up.

>Which one do you have?

Good to know some are, which one is that?

Agreed, Nexus 4 was already a great deal, IMO, at $350, $250 is a ridiculous price.

Thing is unlocked to boot, great for working abroad. Unlocked iPhone, what, $650-750, no?

Having ditched OSX for Linux a few years ago, Android just makes cents, literally, lots of them ;-)

Damn I just bought one at regular price lol. Nexus 4, if you build your own o/s is amazing fast. Runs SEAndroid like a charm too, you can lockout audio, camera and mic whenever not in use

There's a buyer protection plan if you purchased after august 12th.

$100 refund by the looks of it.

You'll have to wade through the support prompts, but start at:

https://support.google.com/nexus/4/

and click 'Contact Us' to get to the form.

Edit: you'll need the order number and the device IMEI

Great success, thanks

I just stumbled across it looking for a 5 day pity refund.

Props to Google for it being an automated process, not so much for total lack of promoting the refund.

I'm a little irked. I ordered mine on the 7th, so miss out by 5 days. But it's a great phone so it's not all bad. But no one likes paying over the asking price, and had I waited a week, I'd be £80 richer.

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