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Show HN: Similar Phone Finder

productchart.com

31 pointsno_gravity27 comments

Your euclidean distance formula is kind of wrong (at least on the site). The units of each term are incompatible so cannot be added together directly, they all should be normalized with a weight factor. A sensible weight factor would be the inverse of the standard deviation of the specific term.

Alternatively you could use the inverse of the covariance matrix as the metric tensor of the properties since there could be quite a few correlations.

The values that go into the formula are normalized, but not weighted. So a similar screen size is "worth" as much as a similar weight. If you find examples, where weighted results would perform better, let me know. You can compare the given phone to other phones by clicking them in the list on the right.

Normalized to what? For me normalization or weighting is equivalent. Putting it this way there could be different normalization factors. Examples:

   1. Average value over all phones
   2. Standard deviation of the value over all phones
   3. Minimal noticeable difference in the given property (it's quite vague though, it's basically custom weighting factors)

I don't think that there is an obvious best, but I don't think it's needed and all gives sensible results.

A more sophisticated distance wouldn't be Euclidean. If you look at x-resolutions and y-resolutions independently you won't catch exotic aspect ratios which should be weighted more compared to a standard aspect ratio phone.

Or better yet, start with nominal normalizing weights and allow the user to adjust them upon viewing to indicate what matters more to them.

This looks good. What I was expecting though was a low price phone which match the specs on my phone. I know those phones are out there, but I would like to sort by price (so that I can find cheapest), OS (android/windows/ios), manufacturer.

Sorting and filtering is pretty much the main functionality of Product Chart. It can be done directly on the smartphone chart:

http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/

The similarity finder is a new addon. I want to find out if "distance based on specs" is an alternative to the usual "customers who bought x also bought y".

If I type my phone "Galaxy Note 4", I get it compared to the "Galaxy Note4" (missing space), which has different battery/screen/weight specs.

http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/similar_to_4245

Thanks, I fixed it.

Good idea.

However, I was expecting that a Xperia Z1 Compact would be compared with an Xperia Z3 Compact, or at least between similar phones.

It is twice the price and twice the max SD card capacity, but besides that, I think they are quite similar: http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/4597_vs_4674 http://www.phonearena.com/phones/size#/phones/size/Sony-Xper...

Refine the comparing algorithm and it will be awesome.

The name recognition could work better. For "HTC M8" it said it had no results. For "M8" it asked me "which M8?", but had only one option. Also - really? The alternative to HTC M9 is....M8? It's like saying that the alternative to Galaxy S6 is S5, and to S5 is S4. Not very helpful.

Pretty cool. It would be nice to be able to restrict the results to only current phones. For example, I will upgrade this summer and wanted to find a phone similar in size and weight to my current phone, but most of the results were for old phones.

I can't find iPhone original. Ok just kidding. I found it.

Hey want to talk about how you built this phone finder site on Glitch Club? http://glitchclub.com/?glitchnow

This is a new experiment I added to Product Chart today: You type in the name of your phone and Product Chart will calculate the euclidean distance over all parameters to all other phones. And then show the "closest" other phone.

Very cool. Would be interesting to gain insight into how many ROMs are available for each device, as well as if there's an official Cyanogenmod release.

I like the design. It's the first time I land on this website. Good idea.

Where are the price pulled from? I guess they are US prices?

Yes, they are synced with amazon.com

Ok thanks

http://goput.it/h188.png

try: oneplus one

I would love to be able to filter by platform (e.g. exclude iOS and Windows Phone)

Comparing specs doesn't give the whole picture though - http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/similar_to_4714

I assure you, the Lumia 925 is more high end than the Moto G.

Cool app!, any chance you could share the dataset?.

What about the physical dimensions of the devices?

I see the Droid RAZR Maxx but not the Droid Maxx.

Thanks, I added it!

This doesn't do what I want, which is to enter iPhone 4S and find something faster with good battery that has a similar form factor.

this would be more useful if it had some subjective measures as well like "build quality" Galaxy s6 comes up as most similar to the droid turbo which seems fairly off base to me. CPU chipset generations would also be helpful to prevent this type of result

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