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Comment by zyb09 | Hacker News Reader

This must be bullshit. Not that I have scientific evidence, but as a app developer I got quite good at identifying a device type just by having a quick glance at it and that's what I usually do to keep me busy in public transport and other places. What I see is about 50% iPhones, the majority being iPhone 4, not so many 4S, but also quite a few iPhone 5. Next up are Samsung phones of all kinds, with the prevalent being S3, S2 and low budget ones like the Ace. Not so many S4 though yet. HTC and everything else are kind of the underdog. And very rarely someone pulls out a BlackBerry. But Windows Phone? I think I've seen one so far. I don't doubt there are out there, but comparing the share with the iPhone is ridiculous.

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Your average Starbucks in London, UK over the last month seems to have the following market share: couple of ipads, single iphone, couple of Samsung android handsets and a lot of windows phones, all Lumia. To be honest I'm quite surprised myself even as a WP user. You see chromebooks a lot as well. Not seen a single surface (yet).

As a side point, I get a lot of people ask me what to buy after they threw £450 on a 4S and broke it (I'm the local informal tech advice guy for the school my kids go to's population of parents). The iphone doesn't have a great reputation in the UK after the first purchase from experience: it's expensive, unreliable (icloud is a piece of crap) and breaks easily and every repair place is dodgy including the apple stores here. This makes it a really bad investment. I don't suggest a solution in particular but people come back with Lumia handsets over new iPhones as they are much cheaper and are functionally equivalent. Either that or they buy a shit android and hate it.

Yeah I'm in London too, have seen a noticeable uptick in the number of Lumia's recently.

Yep, can confirm too. Those bright coloured Nokias are easy to spot and I saw a lot more of them over the summer.

I spotted one in Exeter yesterday!

All of my friends have yachts, so everyone in the world must have one or two. All statistics are bullshit, personal experiences are always valid though.

Not in France. I don't have a car so I take the bus and the regional train a lot. Most people there have either a dumb phone or an old & cheap Android or Blackberry. At my driver's license courses, I was surprised that at least 3 people had a Windows Phone (the cheaper models). iPhones are for rich people.

In countries where people buy their phone without a contract attached, there is a real market for a <100€ device. The cheaper the better.

I don't know. I went to Europe for all of June and saw a lot more Windows Phones than I do in the U.S. Particularly in Italy.

Where do you live? Smartphone marketshare is highly regional. I live in belgium and see them all the time.

And how you able to tell the difference between the 4 and 4S? Are you looking at the seams in the antenna?

yeah iPhone 4's have a line on top, while 4S's don't. Easy to see when someone is holding it in their hand.

Not to be "single data-point guy", but including mine, there are 3 in the technology group at work. And maybe 3 iPhones, with 5 or more Androids rounding it out.

The phone has a few nits (the single volume control being #1 on my list) but on the whole I like it. Partly because I got a little burned out on iDevices (3 iPhones over the years) and wanted something different, but also because of the camera (I have a 928, which I got like 2 weeks before the 1020 was announced - bad timing). I took some photos at a backyard party the other night, and the low light performance is excellent.

I like the look of the phone, and I'm hoping that Microsoft turns some of the Nokia designers & engineers loose on the Surface, and give it some style.

I'm curious as to bow you tell an iphone 4s apart from a 4 at a glance.

Because the 4 is being held wrongly...

How can you differentiate a 4s from a 4 just by glancing at it?

The 4S lacks the seam at the top.

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