5 ms·

How Do You Beat iPhone?

38 points by steven 11y ago

noir_lord 11y ago
> surely there’s got to be more in our future than just chasing incrementalism — walking the incremental iPhone walk, two steps behind. You wait for something you see a lot on here a "paradigm shift". Incremental improvements over the incumbent rarely displace the incumbent (unless they do something crazy). If the desktop had stayed the primary computing device most people interacted with Microsoft would still have a complete lock on the entire thing, Smartphones and Tablets as mass market consumer devices disrupted Microsoft's monopoly by forcing them to compete in a world with devices not running their OS. I doubt anyone will beat Apple at making a better smartphone in the short-medium term (I use a Nexus 4 but that was purely a cost/good enough decision) but I wouldn't bet against something coming out that creates a window, if I had to hazard a guess I'd say something like VR/AR in a consumer friendly package at an affordable price but you'd still need some kind of hardware to run the unit and I think a Smartphone is the natural fit for that so maybe the phone will stay central longer than I expect. What I'd really like is something about the weight of the specs I wear for screen work, that has intelligent feeds that I can customise for what I'm doing, if you could overlay video and such on top of that you'd really have something. I regulary repair my roadbike and sometimes end up using youtube videos for instruction, having a small "HD" screen I could have in vision while I'm doing that would be incredibly useful, or the ability to pull up a shell and view some text wherever I am (server misbehaving or whatever). That's something I'd pay £300 for.
andrewla 11y ago
I'm a huge iPhone fan, but even I have to admit that the core premise here is a bit far-fetched. The other phones are not trailing the iPhone, they're leading it. There's not a single feature (maybe force-touch?) that my Android friends have not crowed about having long before it finally arrived on the next iPhone iteration. Apple is doing here what Microsoft did when they were in their prime. Let the other guys experiment with a ton of random features, and then wait, and copy the best features from the last batch, but make them a little better.
- daniel_levine 11y ago
  Apple is first to a bunch of things: Apple Pay, Force Touch, Touch ID etc. They're also so much further ahead on dimensions like performance, battery life, build quality, camera, apps, etc. Those things are so important, I think they're similar to "being first"
  - Oletros 11y ago
    > Apple Pay, Force Touch, Touch ID etc. Yes, those Apple things were first shown on an iPhone. It doesn't means that those technologies were first shown on the iPhone
  - ytjohn 11y ago
    I've been using Google Wallet for a long time. When Apple Pay came out, more places started providing nfc readers, which made my Google Wallet (not called Android Pay) work in more places.
  - mkane848 11y ago
    Apple Pay and TouchID? Come on now, at least retina displays and Force Touch are good examples, but Apple certainly wasn't the first to implement eWallets or fingerprints linked to your ID. And while I'll concede that things like their cameras are great, the only reason certain things like performance and battery life are what they are is because they control iOS AND all of the hardware running it. And app development on iOS has just as many pros and cons as developing for Android, I don't think it fair to label one as better in that regard.
    - pravka 11y ago
      Not even Force Touch is a good example; Android has had getPressure() API since v1.
      - mkane848 11y ago
        Huh, TIL. Thanks!
thesteg 11y ago
At least from my point of view, the perceived value of the iPhone increases with each additional device and service of Apple you use. I recently had the opportunity to test a Samsung: While the device itself was great, I didn't even try to get my music or photos synced. I'm so used of Apple flawless integration with each other. That's the challenge.
davnicwil 11y ago
> Me, I love mountains... my iPhone is a terrible companion. Battery life is poor. Interface sub-optimal as I wear gloves, sweat, am in motion, etc. What I want is an AdventurePhone. Replaceable battery. Sturdy. Waterproof. Dual SIM. Easily mountable. Great camera. Solid grip. I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely the opposite direction. The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small, light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough. In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the 'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised 'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you exactly the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity. Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS? extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.
- listic 11y ago
  > which means a small Not that small, actually: phones keep getting bigger and bigger over time, a tendency that even Apple succumbed to. It still proves your point, though: manufacturers are optimizing for a stable environment where users are ok with using an unwieldy phone.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I disagree. I dislike having that many devices, I remember being so excited when phones started to have lots of memory and ability to play MP3s - I could skip having an MP3 player. Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it. It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its parts. People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together. Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus more ability to hack it. Plus all sensors. There aren't that many things that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone manufacturers are playing. We could have had a goddamn tricorder. It wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.
Animats 11y ago
Their suggested two-phone solution makes sense. Carriers should offer plans where you can have two phones, one of which might be a tablet, with the same phone number for the price of one, as long as you don't use them both at the same time. For incoming calls, both ring, if turned on. You shouldn't need a "cloud service" like Grand Central/Google Voice for this, just an arrangement with the carrier. This is a solution to the "fat phone" problem - the things are just getting too big.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  ...or just promote tethering as a first-class feature and charge per GB of data.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    It's sort of here in (surprisingly) Australia. https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/share-your-data https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/sha... http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing
dsr_ 11y ago
This is still too wedded to the idea of "apps" and a modern smartphone environment. Try something really different: A seawaterproof, dust-proof, shock-resistant aluminum-magnesium alloy cylinder. A lanyard hole on top and another on the bottom. No display. No headphone jack. No SMS, no wireless data system. A USB port under a lid. A camera with a physical viewfinder and one button: when you press it, it takes a picture. No review, no fancy filters. A speaker and a microphone. A big battery. Three or four days of moderate use. Two more buttons: GO and STOP. No keypad, no directional keys. The interface is voice based. Tap GO, say "Call Fred". It slurps your contact database from your iPhone or Android, whatever you use the rest of the time. When it rings, you can hit GO to accept the call or STOP to send it to your other phone, where it can go to your normal voicemail. It doesn't play games. It has a few minor features, all under voice command: "Set alarm 6 AM", "Timer on" "Lap", "Timer off", "What time is it?". You can recharge it via the USB port, you can mount it as a drive and send off the photos, you can upload a new contact list. The battery is replaceable. Four band GSM with a SIM card next to the battery. You can use it anywhere except Antarctica. Selling points: it keeps working, longer and in harsher conditions than you want to take any black mirror. You can use it one-handed without looking at it. Take it with you jogging, rock climbing, or SCUBA diving. It doesn't look like a phone, so it's not an automatic theft target. In a rough situation you can hit someone with it and expect it to work afterwards. James Bond would carry one, if he and it existed.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jbigelow76 11y ago
  I've never thought HN was missing the ability to post images as responses. But this one time... http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png/revision/latest?cb=20090908145331 http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/The... :)
- jowiar 11y ago
  Voice recognition in 2015 is where touchscreens were 15 years ago. It sort-of works, the way Palms sort-of worked, but Palms never really took off the same way Siri hasn't really taken off. Current smartphones are just iterative improvements based on affordable touchscreens crossing the "suck" to "don't suck" threshold. The voice-as-UI will come (and such a device looks like a particularly nice match for a smartwatch), but it's not a problem of the design not being tried -- it's that it's still some serious hardware/software R&D breakthrough away from being viable.
draw_down 11y ago
Why does the iPhone need to be "beaten" in the first place?
- gtk40 11y ago
  I feel like some of the points he raises in the article answer that question. The one most compelling to me from the article is that I would like something more rugged and usable for hiking, biking, skiing, etc. than the current types of smartphones.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    I think it's really unfocused. It does talk about (perceived) shortcomings of the iPhone, but then it goes on to talk about complementing the iPhone instead of competing with it. But even if it actually were about beating the iPhone, my question stands. It's an extremely popular product with very high customer satisfaction ratings. We as consumers should be so lucky to have an analogue in other market sectors. If only, say, cars had the same problem. Or televisions, or shoes, or or or...
- awesomeasfuck 11y ago
  And this is the point.... any device that tries to "beat" the iPhone will fail by fighting a pointless spec war. Any future device that comes along that truly changes everything, needs to forget about what the iPhone does and re-imagines everything again... that will be some time yet.
dasil003 11y ago
The smart phone category is now firmly established, and there's little room for radical innovation. It's not a question of colonizing new niches—the market trend has been exactly the opposite, the iPhone cannibalized entire product categories by being good enough at so many things and then surpassing them with the integration benefits. Sure there is room for innovation and expansion into new niches, but those are small local maxima, nothing that is revolutionize phones again. If you realize what the smartphone means—literally the entire middle class population with a powerful networked computer in their pocket—and where it stands in the logical progress of computers from government to business to home to the person, it's clear that the next revolution of this magnitude will be nothing less than physical implants. Maybe there will be some intermediate step like Google Glass, but just like smart watches it's very hard to beat the utility of a phone in your pocket. Other major innovations will happen, sure, but they will come out of unexpected areas and solve new problems. The OA seems to be nostalgic for the pace of innovation of the last 8 years, but that time is over now, smartphones will continue to improve incrementally but the low-hanging fruit for reinventing them is pretty well harvested. Even if someone comes up with a fundamentally better mobile paradigm than iOS it's probably impossible to overcome the network and polish effects of a decade of Apple and Google pouring their entire essence into their respective mobile platforms.
l1feh4ck 11y ago
I would like to have a fully modular phone. Where i can change or add hardware capabilities (like fairphone) . More hardware freedom.
Oletros 11y ago
> Everybody seems content chasing the iPhone I think that he starts with a wrong hypothesis
bitcuration 11y ago
Beat iPhone? Get in line bro as its a loooong line. All my banking/credit card apps on iPhone turned into Touch ID based starting this year. Last year this time I had to go through a battle to convince my fellow corporate colleague that the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in androids. This is what apple always do and still very good at, show the world how to turn technology into improving quality of average man's life, though far less than what men have hoped and so far is the only one who has manage to pull it off. What Microsoft, IBM have done at most to affect people's work life, but nowhere near what Apple has done. The rest of industry would be much better off if simple watch and learn. There is this mindset that's still light year ahead from what most have perceived.
- Oletros 11y ago
  > the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in androids. I suppose that you will provide some examples of those security breachs
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-phones-are-vulnerable-to-new-stagefright-bugs/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-ph...
    - Oletros 11y ago
      Now tell me what has to do Stagefright with the implication that Google Play is not secure as the OP did. Or are you just posting the first thing you find in Google withouts knowing what it means?
      - ceejayoz 11y ago
        I don't see anything in OP's post specific to Google Play. Did they edit?
  - x0x0 11y ago
atarian 11y ago
The most glaring problem with the iPhone and other smartphones is battery life. So if you want to beat the iPhone, build a smartphone that is comparable to the iPhone but can last a week or more on battery.
- enjo 11y ago
  WHILE maintaining a good android software experience. The Z3 was an AMAZING phone. Good camera, waterproof (like take it in water waterproof), good hand-feel.. lots of stuff going for it. Sony's layer on top of Android abortion made it a bad phone that didn't meet with much commercial success. Stock android right now is the most delightful phone OS in the world (in my opinion).. why Android phone manufacturers keep running away from it, installing bloatware, and generally missing the mark I'll never understand.
- otterley 11y ago
  There's nothing wrong with the iPhone's battery life - the problem is more likely where you use it. Almost any phone's battery will last for days in a place where cell site antennas are dense and close enough to provide connectivity without making the radio work very hard. I was surprised to find how much battery I had left at the end of the day in a major Indian city, as opposed to in San Francisco. One or two bars of signal strength may be enough to make your phone useful, but it's no good for one's battery life. Recall that the radio power-to-distance function is logarithmic.
mrpebbles 11y ago
What the author and other commenters are alluding to imo are niche markets at a shot of winning. Most hard working americans DONT need a 2nd phone. If you want to be a niche player then fine make an adventure phone, but no shot thats going mass market to defeat iphone. And what the author is forgetting , missing is its not just about the Iphone in regards to apple but Its the ENTIRE seamless Ecosystem. Thats why apple is winning !

38 points by steven 11y ago

> surely there’s got to be more in our future than just chasing incrementalism — walking the incremental iPhone walk, two steps behind. You wait for something you see a lot on here a "paradigm shift". Incremental improvements over the incumbent rarely displace the incumbent (unless they do something crazy). If the desktop had stayed the primary computing device most people interacted with Microsoft would still have a complete lock on the entire thing, Smartphones and Tablets as mass market consumer devices disrupted Microsoft's monopoly by forcing them to compete in a world with devices not running their OS. I doubt anyone will beat Apple at making a better smartphone in the short-medium term (I use a Nexus 4 but that was purely a cost/good enough decision) but I wouldn't bet against something coming out that creates a window, if I had to hazard a guess I'd say something like VR/AR in a consumer friendly package at an affordable price but you'd still need some kind of hardware to run the unit and I think a Smartphone is the natural fit for that so maybe the phone will stay central longer than I expect. What I'd really like is something about the weight of the specs I wear for screen work, that has intelligent feeds that I can customise for what I'm doing, if you could overlay video and such on top of that you'd really have something. I regulary repair my roadbike and sometimes end up using youtube videos for instruction, having a small "HD" screen I could have in vision while I'm doing that would be incredibly useful, or the ability to pull up a shell and view some text wherever I am (server misbehaving or whatever). That's something I'd pay £300 for.

andrewla 11y ago

I'm a huge iPhone fan, but even I have to admit that the core premise here is a bit far-fetched. The other phones are not trailing the iPhone, they're leading it. There's not a single feature (maybe force-touch?) that my Android friends have not crowed about having long before it finally arrived on the next iPhone iteration. Apple is doing here what Microsoft did when they were in their prime. Let the other guys experiment with a ton of random features, and then wait, and copy the best features from the last batch, but make them a little better.

daniel_levine 11y ago
Apple is first to a bunch of things: Apple Pay, Force Touch, Touch ID etc. They're also so much further ahead on dimensions like performance, battery life, build quality, camera, apps, etc. Those things are so important, I think they're similar to "being first"
- Oletros 11y ago
  > Apple Pay, Force Touch, Touch ID etc. Yes, those Apple things were first shown on an iPhone. It doesn't means that those technologies were first shown on the iPhone
- ytjohn 11y ago
  I've been using Google Wallet for a long time. When Apple Pay came out, more places started providing nfc readers, which made my Google Wallet (not called Android Pay) work in more places.
- mkane848 11y ago
  Apple Pay and TouchID? Come on now, at least retina displays and Force Touch are good examples, but Apple certainly wasn't the first to implement eWallets or fingerprints linked to your ID. And while I'll concede that things like their cameras are great, the only reason certain things like performance and battery life are what they are is because they control iOS AND all of the hardware running it. And app development on iOS has just as many pros and cons as developing for Android, I don't think it fair to label one as better in that regard.
  - pravka 11y ago
    Not even Force Touch is a good example; Android has had getPressure() API since v1.
    - mkane848 11y ago
      Huh, TIL. Thanks!

thesteg 11y ago

At least from my point of view, the perceived value of the iPhone increases with each additional device and service of Apple you use. I recently had the opportunity to test a Samsung: While the device itself was great, I didn't even try to get my music or photos synced. I'm so used of Apple flawless integration with each other. That's the challenge.

davnicwil 11y ago

> Me, I love mountains... my iPhone is a terrible companion. Battery life is poor. Interface sub-optimal as I wear gloves, sweat, am in motion, etc. What I want is an AdventurePhone. Replaceable battery. Sturdy. Waterproof. Dual SIM. Easily mountable. Great camera. Solid grip. I see the author's point, but I'd actually approach a solution in completely the opposite direction. The whole reason the phone has become the all-in-one do-everything device is that the vast, vast majority of the time, most people aren't doing some highly specialised activity like skiing. Rather they're going about their daily lives, in a very predictable, stable environment. In that scenario, you want to optimise for convenience, which means portability, which means a small, light, touchscreen device that does everything well enough. In the specialised activity usecase, you want precisely the opposite of the 'all in one convenience' approach - you want specialised tools that each do one thing really well. So you absolutely don't want to swap out your iPhone for an 'adventurePhone' which packs a load of features behind a specialised 'skiiing' interface - that's an unnecessary and almost certainly wasteful mix of specialised and generalised tools - what you do want is a set of specialised tools, each with its own ski-friendly interface, to give you exactly the feature set you want for your highly specialised activity. Camera? GoPro. GPS? Garmin watch. Music? Ipod shuffle. Phone calls/SMS? extremely cheap Dual-SIM solid-as-a-rock dumb phone. Occasional use of chat app? Cheap, light dont-care-if-it-breaks android device.

listic 11y ago
> which means a small Not that small, actually: phones keep getting bigger and bigger over time, a tendency that even Apple succumbed to. It still proves your point, though: manufacturers are optimizing for a stable environment where users are ok with using an unwieldy phone.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I disagree. I dislike having that many devices, I remember being so excited when phones started to have lots of memory and ability to play MP3s - I could skip having an MP3 player. Each device imposes a maintenance burden. You have to remember to charge it. It takes space. It's easy to forget to take that Nth device with you. They're usually not interoperable, they don't talk with each other at all - which is bad, because in this case an integrated device is more than a sum of its parts. People get the Unix philosophy backwards - having lots of small tools is nothing but making waste if you can't compose them together. Personally, I want a SpecOps phone. Everything the AdventurePhone has, plus more ability to hack it. Plus all sensors. There aren't that many things that piss me off more than the stupid market segmentation games phone manufacturers are playing. We could have had a goddamn tricorder. It wouldn't be even that expensive because the parts are already there, and economies of scale works in favour of less differentiated devices here. But we don't have it and won't have it, because mobile devices are designed with sole purpose of milking money out of consumers, instead of giving people a versatile tool to expand their power and abilities.

Animats 11y ago

Their suggested two-phone solution makes sense. Carriers should offer plans where you can have two phones, one of which might be a tablet, with the same phone number for the price of one, as long as you don't use them both at the same time. For incoming calls, both ring, if turned on. You shouldn't need a "cloud service" like Grand Central/Google Voice for this, just an arrangement with the carrier. This is a solution to the "fat phone" problem - the things are just getting too big.

humanrebar 11y ago
...or just promote tethering as a first-class feature and charge per GB of data.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  It's sort of here in (surprisingly) Australia. https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/share-your-data https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/plans-and-rates/sha... http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing http://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobile/phone-plans/data-sharing

dsr_ 11y ago

This is still too wedded to the idea of "apps" and a modern smartphone environment. Try something really different: A seawaterproof, dust-proof, shock-resistant aluminum-magnesium alloy cylinder. A lanyard hole on top and another on the bottom. No display. No headphone jack. No SMS, no wireless data system. A USB port under a lid. A camera with a physical viewfinder and one button: when you press it, it takes a picture. No review, no fancy filters. A speaker and a microphone. A big battery. Three or four days of moderate use. Two more buttons: GO and STOP. No keypad, no directional keys. The interface is voice based. Tap GO, say "Call Fred". It slurps your contact database from your iPhone or Android, whatever you use the rest of the time. When it rings, you can hit GO to accept the call or STOP to send it to your other phone, where it can go to your normal voicemail. It doesn't play games. It has a few minor features, all under voice command: "Set alarm 6 AM", "Timer on" "Lap", "Timer off", "What time is it?". You can recharge it via the USB port, you can mount it as a drive and send off the photos, you can upload a new contact list. The battery is replaceable. Four band GSM with a SIM card next to the battery. You can use it anywhere except Antarctica. Selling points: it keeps working, longer and in harsher conditions than you want to take any black mirror. You can use it one-handed without looking at it. Take it with you jogging, rock climbing, or SCUBA diving. It doesn't look like a phone, so it's not an automatic theft target. In a rough situation you can hit someone with it and expect it to work afterwards. James Bond would carry one, if he and it existed.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jbigelow76 11y ago
I've never thought HN was missing the ability to post images as responses. But this one time... http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png/revision/latest?cb=20090908145331 http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/The... :)
jowiar 11y ago
Voice recognition in 2015 is where touchscreens were 15 years ago. It sort-of works, the way Palms sort-of worked, but Palms never really took off the same way Siri hasn't really taken off. Current smartphones are just iterative improvements based on affordable touchscreens crossing the "suck" to "don't suck" threshold. The voice-as-UI will come (and such a device looks like a particularly nice match for a smartwatch), but it's not a problem of the design not being tried -- it's that it's still some serious hardware/software R&D breakthrough away from being viable.

draw_down 11y ago

Why does the iPhone need to be "beaten" in the first place?

gtk40 11y ago
I feel like some of the points he raises in the article answer that question. The one most compelling to me from the article is that I would like something more rugged and usable for hiking, biking, skiing, etc. than the current types of smartphones.
- draw_down 11y ago
  I think it's really unfocused. It does talk about (perceived) shortcomings of the iPhone, but then it goes on to talk about complementing the iPhone instead of competing with it. But even if it actually were about beating the iPhone, my question stands. It's an extremely popular product with very high customer satisfaction ratings. We as consumers should be so lucky to have an analogue in other market sectors. If only, say, cars had the same problem. Or televisions, or shoes, or or or...
awesomeasfuck 11y ago
And this is the point.... any device that tries to "beat" the iPhone will fail by fighting a pointless spec war. Any future device that comes along that truly changes everything, needs to forget about what the iPhone does and re-imagines everything again... that will be some time yet.

dasil003 11y ago

The smart phone category is now firmly established, and there's little room for radical innovation. It's not a question of colonizing new niches—the market trend has been exactly the opposite, the iPhone cannibalized entire product categories by being good enough at so many things and then surpassing them with the integration benefits. Sure there is room for innovation and expansion into new niches, but those are small local maxima, nothing that is revolutionize phones again. If you realize what the smartphone means—literally the entire middle class population with a powerful networked computer in their pocket—and where it stands in the logical progress of computers from government to business to home to the person, it's clear that the next revolution of this magnitude will be nothing less than physical implants. Maybe there will be some intermediate step like Google Glass, but just like smart watches it's very hard to beat the utility of a phone in your pocket. Other major innovations will happen, sure, but they will come out of unexpected areas and solve new problems. The OA seems to be nostalgic for the pace of innovation of the last 8 years, but that time is over now, smartphones will continue to improve incrementally but the low-hanging fruit for reinventing them is pretty well harvested. Even if someone comes up with a fundamentally better mobile paradigm than iOS it's probably impossible to overcome the network and polish effects of a decade of Apple and Google pouring their entire essence into their respective mobile platforms.

l1feh4ck 11y ago

I would like to have a fully modular phone. Where i can change or add hardware capabilities (like fairphone) . More hardware freedom.

Oletros 11y ago

> Everybody seems content chasing the iPhone I think that he starts with a wrong hypothesis

bitcuration 11y ago

Beat iPhone? Get in line bro as its a loooong line. All my banking/credit card apps on iPhone turned into Touch ID based starting this year. Last year this time I had to go through a battle to convince my fellow corporate colleague that the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in androids. This is what apple always do and still very good at, show the world how to turn technology into improving quality of average man's life, though far less than what men have hoped and so far is the only one who has manage to pull it off. What Microsoft, IBM have done at most to affect people's work life, but nowhere near what Apple has done. The rest of industry would be much better off if simple watch and learn. There is this mindset that's still light year ahead from what most have perceived.

Oletros 11y ago
> the Touch ID is not some scary security breach wannabe like those found in androids. I suppose that you will provide some examples of those security breachs
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-phones-are-vulnerable-to-new-stagefright-bugs/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/a-billion-android-ph...
  - Oletros 11y ago
    Now tell me what has to do Stagefright with the implication that Google Play is not secure as the OP did. Or are you just posting the first thing you find in Google withouts knowing what it means?
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      I don't see anything in OP's post specific to Google Play. Did they edit?
- x0x0 11y ago

atarian 11y ago

The most glaring problem with the iPhone and other smartphones is battery life. So if you want to beat the iPhone, build a smartphone that is comparable to the iPhone but can last a week or more on battery.

enjo 11y ago
WHILE maintaining a good android software experience. The Z3 was an AMAZING phone. Good camera, waterproof (like take it in water waterproof), good hand-feel.. lots of stuff going for it. Sony's layer on top of Android abortion made it a bad phone that didn't meet with much commercial success. Stock android right now is the most delightful phone OS in the world (in my opinion).. why Android phone manufacturers keep running away from it, installing bloatware, and generally missing the mark I'll never understand.
otterley 11y ago
There's nothing wrong with the iPhone's battery life - the problem is more likely where you use it. Almost any phone's battery will last for days in a place where cell site antennas are dense and close enough to provide connectivity without making the radio work very hard. I was surprised to find how much battery I had left at the end of the day in a major Indian city, as opposed to in San Francisco. One or two bars of signal strength may be enough to make your phone useful, but it's no good for one's battery life. Recall that the radio power-to-distance function is logarithmic.

mrpebbles 11y ago

What the author and other commenters are alluding to imo are niche markets at a shot of winning. Most hard working americans DONT need a 2nd phone. If you want to be a niche player then fine make an adventure phone, but no shot thats going mass market to defeat iphone. And what the author is forgetting , missing is its not just about the Iphone in regards to apple but Its the ENTIRE seamless Ecosystem. Thats why apple is winning !