timfountain

That redneck is one of the most annoying idiots I've had the displeasure of listening to in a while. That's 2 minutes I won't get back.

WIRunner

He's not that bad. He's also Canadian, not sure what the term is for them. He's also quite popular on YouTube.

Silver Fox

Is it Canadian?

GUWonder

The word "loon" came to mind. But that's usually a reference to Canadian coins of sort.

Boogans, hoser, yahoo. Some of these are also used in the US.

msp3

Was recently asked this by a colleague who uses disposable Android phones (aren't all lagdroid phones?) that cost less then $100, actually had trouble coming up with reasons why I needed an iPhone. The reasons I could think of were:

1) iMessage/FaceTime/iCloud, etc.
2) Many apps, all of some quality, and they work
3) If anything ever goes wrong I walk into a real company store staffed by real people who deal with this issue for me instead of calling some horrible outsourced call center where idiots neither understand English nor care (or pretend to not understand what you want even if their English is fine), wait many weeks for your phone to be sent back and fourth and add extra weeks when the fix isn't done right
4) If you're not impulsive and can wait, carriers/national retailers have good deals that come and go, just jump on a good one and never pay MSRP
5) Feels like a quality product, feels well thought out, smooth and substansive

What I could not refute was, are all these things worth paying 6-7x the price of a disposable $100 phone?

kb9522

wco81

People who read this forum buy $300 Bose headphones mainly for flights.

Hard to believe they'd balk at paying for a premium phone, something they will use every day.

nkedel

Some people who read this forum; hardly all of them. And, from what I can see from friends who have them, a pair of Bose headphones lasts a HECK of a longer than a smartphone, both in terms of durability under typical use and obsolescence.

Perhaps because the premium phones aren't actually than much better for everyone's use cases. Mind, I'm not a fan of the around-the-ear style of headphones and find the free loaner Bose sets on AA not to my liking, but it seems like plenty of people find it comfortable and the level of noise cancellation really is that much better than say my $40 Audio-technicas or the $40 Aiwas I had before that.

wco81

Do those headphones last? Seems like Bose churn them out.

Premium phones will have better displays, better processors, better modems, better cameras, better design.

More RAM, more processing power so no hangs.

Now people can question whether all those traits are worth several hundred dollars more.

nkedel

Bose stopped selling the original QC2 in what, 2009, ~8-9 years ago. I know a couple people still using them. The ear pads need replacing occasionally but the rest of the kit seems pretty durable.

"Better displays" are both somewhat subjective, and for most people kind of an irrelevance when $200 phones got to "good enough" a couple of years ago. Most of the $100-ish phones still have objectively worse displays, but that's starting to change. Some of the trends towards "better" actively make the phones worse for some people (trend towards ever bigger phones -- which I like -- doesn't fit everyone's pockets or hands, absurdly high resolution hurting battery life and performance, bezel-less phones one can't actually hold the same way one , the silly "notch" breaking older software)

]"Better processors" was a much bigger deal a few years ago; the newest $100 phones have quad cores these days, and for typical use many people won't notice the difference.

A new $200 phone will have a better modem than a two year old iPhone. Probably than last year's iPhone.

Better cameras is indisputable -- and most sub-$200 budget phones still have genuinely crap cameras -- although even there, a newer mid-range phone will have a better camera than a two year old iPhone. And at least on midrange phones, "good enough" that many people don't care has hit in the past couple of years.

"Better design" is entirely subjective, and not everyone is impressed with the super-fragile glass that has taken over both Apple and Samsung flagship design. Heck, judging by the number of iPhone and Galaxy owners I know who immediately stuff the phone in a bulky plastic case, it's pretty clear that's an awful lot of iPhone and Samsung owners.

At least on the Android side, new midrange phones come out enough faster that they often have more RAM and bigger processors than the still-top-of-the-line flagship phones which Samsung only updates once a year. Moreover, while 6GB and even 8GB RAM has been available in phones for about 18 months now, most people aren't anywhere near enough power users to care about the difference between 3-4GB and over.

Not to mention that on more budget phones you can often get features that have disappeared on flagships, like interchangeable batteries and SD card slots for expandable memory, or dual-SIM here in the US (although it's not unknown in non-US model flagships.)

There's a continuum, from the $40 subsidized budget phones, to absurdities like the iPhone X. There's no one value proposition that will be best for everyone. For me, as I've said up-thread, midrange Android phones have offered the best value for some time, but that isn't intended to say that they're going to be the best value for everyone or even necessarily anyone else.

PTravel

Same functions are available for Android.

Same is true for Android, and many useful apps are free.

I've never had an Android phone "go wrong," or need repair. Also, neither my phone service provider nor Samsung has ever pushed an update that slowed down, or otherwise hindered, the operation of my phone.

Same is true of Android.

Certainly true of the Android phones I've owned, including my latest, a Note10.

Yes, but . . . it's comparing apples to oranges. Headphones aren't used every day, don't sit in your pocket and aren't exposed to a variety of weather conditions. I've had Bose since the QC1 days, and I like them very much. Given appropriate care, they hold up fine, but they're no where near as tough as a cellphone.

They also have functions not available in other phones. My Note 8 has a stylus that includes handwriting recognition, and also a small dock that turns it into a credible multi-tasking computer.

Hardly subjective. Display size, resolution, pixel density, color gamut and gamma are all readily quantifiable, just as with any electronic display medium.

Well, that sounds, at least to me, like the Apple philosophy, isn't it? "Everyone works the same way?" The issue isn't whether a phone "works" but whether it works the way you want it to.

I'm not sure what you mean by "modem." Digital phones don't have modems.

My Note 8 has a Gorilla Glass display, which most certainly is not super-fragile. In fact, my Note 8 is the first smart phone I've owned for which I have NOT purchased a case. I don't know where you're getting this.

Well, there you go again with the "most people" standard. I suspect most people don't need more than 4 gig for their desktop or laptop. I edit video and audio and do lots of graphics, frequently at the same time. I need the 32 gig that's in my primary home machine. Flagship phones (or desktops or laptops) are not intended for "most people," but for people who need the power and features, which is why they have better specs.

The general trend on all phones is away from interchangeable batteries, for which only time will tell whether that's a good thing or not. My Note 8 doesn't have dual SIM, but I can't think of any reason I'd need it. When I travel internationally, it's easy enough to put in a local SIM, which is what I do. It does have support for a microSD card. You may be thinking of Apple, which has dropped support for wired headphones, a huge mistake in my view in that Bluetooth, being an inherently compressed and lossy digital transfer medium when used for audio, can never provide HD audio or anything close.

Dodge DeBoulet

Always on the bleeding edge, Counselor. Or maybe today was "octal" day

WIRunner

It will be interesting in two years when the Note 10 phone arrives and the Note 10 tablet has been around for years. Will they skip a year?

PTravel

Good grief -- what was I thinking when I wrote that?

nkedel

Display size is objective; what display size is better is very much subjective. Scroll up to all the complaints about typical flagship-size phones being too large for some folks' pockets, if nothing else, or longer ago the "this is too large for one-handed use."

Resolution is objective (as is pixel density, which is of course just resolution / size); whether there's any advantage for a given user to any given increase in resolution is subjective (and higher resolution has costs in both performance and battery life, all other things being equal.)

(underlining mine)
Yes, absolutely; OTOH, this was a direct response to wco81 who assumed that everyone within some assumed demographic of Flyertalk worked in such a way that a flagship phone was both advantageous and advantageous enough to actually justify the higher cost.

"Modem" is a term, in this case, for the subsystem that talks to whatever subset of LTE/UMTS/CDMA/GSM the phone talks to. I would normally say "radio," but was using wco81's choice of terms since it was a direct reply to them.

I don't have an opinion of the durability of any of these phones; I just have an observation that a huge number of phones I see out there immediately go into cases. I haven't counted to be sure it's a majority, but it's a very large minority if not.

That's not how they're marketed (here in the US, at least): Apple and Samsung and to a lesser extent other manufacturers try very hard to create the assumption that their main flagship models of iPhone and Galaxy S respectively ARE the mainstream options for most people. The Note series, and now the iPhone X are somewhat exceptions to that.

...and again, you're interjecting into a direct response to wco81 regarding an assumption of what most people on this thread/Flyertalk are likely to need. My use of a smartphone is likely more modest than many here, and heavier than others -- but for the former part is in part because I've got a tendency to move tofull-size computers (although 4GB is a miserable experience on Windows these days; 8GB really should be the bare minimum even for light users.)

As I said above : There's a continuum, from the $40 subsidized budget phones, to absurdities like the iPhone X. There's no one value proposition that will be best for everyone. For me, as I've said up-thread, midrange Android phones have offered the best value for some time, but that isn't intended to say that they're going to be the best value for everyone or even necessarily anyone else.

Far be it for me to tell anyone else (or at least anyone other than folks in my family where I'm the one paying for their phone) not to get a higher-end phone. Or a lower-end one.

Not everyone is going to care about every feature; that's a major advantage of Android -- because there are a lot more options.

As for Bluetooth, plenty of Android phones offer aptX which is a lossless compressed format and supposedly much better than the native BT codecs. For that matter, bluetooth EDR (at short ranges and with a strong signal, which should be the case between one's pocket and a headset) has plenty of bandwidth for CD-quality uncompressed audio (~1.5Mbps out of a ~2Mbps practical limit on Bluetooth EDR) or FLAC. I have no idea if Apple has licensed aptX, or if they've got their own better codec, but it's certainly not implausible.