Item — HN Reader

Maybe they should try to be different, instead of being iPhone clones.

Every one I know have a super slim phone, then a case to prevent it to be broken and make the phone not slim anymore and then a second battery. So why not make a less slim phone with hardened chassis and a longer battery ? And market it as such (you want slim that last 8h and you can't plug your earphones, go Apple, you want solid that last 2 days and you can plug your earphones, buy Me)

And they also should embrace XDA community who work for free in advocating "a phone".

And they should also accept that a premium 4.5 /4.8 screen phone is also in demand, not just 5.5 and 6.0.

And give removable battery so we, paranoid, can really unplug the phone without having to put in the fridge.

5 comments

Of maybe a phone that respected user privacy. Even if you couldn't open source the modem firmware due to the FCC, you could at least put it behind a IOMMU rather than having it as half the SoC with the power to take control of perpiherals and read memory whenever it wants, independently of what the CPU is doing.

Just give me something 5", with a big battery, big frame - as you describe - 1080p, I don't care about the display war, decent storage, usb-c, an sd card slot, and a camera that is alright and it is an instant purchase for myself and everybody whose tech purchasing I influence if it is FSF certified.

Sounds like the Oukitel K4000: http://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_237295.html

I got one a couple of months ago and it does seem to be well built. Most impressively is the battery life that goes on for days.

You mean something like this? http://www.evolveo.eu/en/rugged

Reason for the cases is that it preserves the phone pristine condition.

Try to resell a phone that is rugged and suffered multiple drops and scratches, you won't be happy. Now, try to sell your phone without the wornout case, which looks close to new: a lot easier.

There are such models, the One Plus One is an example.

I own one and the OnePlus One has its own set of problems. Maybe most annoyingly, the touch screen doesn't work in warm weather. It also took them months to fix very basic functionality (the touch screen had ghost touch issues for a great deal of people in the beginning). Support barely exists (I don't know if they managed to improve on that by now). Also CyanogenOS is getting more and more annoying, with tons of crapware being bundled (a weird dialler, Cortana) and even ads (the "open with" intent chooser has suggestions to install Microsoft apps for certain file types).

Oh and it frequently doesn't play well with Google Play Services. There's an awful lot of battery drain because Play Services doesn't seem to like some of the modifications they made. Currently mine loses some 30% of charge overnight in airplane mode.