Same experience though, people have either heard of it and rave about it, or ask who makes it.
Example: I have security sensitive US clients, and I'd be concerned that (in the future, let alone present) I'd be labeled a security risk for carrying a "chinese cellphone."
How do you mitigate this concern? (serious replies only please)
I think if you put a case on it, the make/model of your phone will be brought up exactly 0 times in life.
Small aside: I used a Oneplus X for more than 5 years, but these days I'm not sure what positives OP have over other manufacturers. Early phones were great value but the recent releases just seem like other flagships. And the Nord for my usage is just a Pixel 4a but worse.
edit: even if you flash the phone with open-source ROMs and firmware, the closed-nature of cellphones in general make it nigh impossible to know what hardware backdoors the manufacturers are forced to put in.
While I assume they have it manufactured in China like Apple and the rest of the world it seems, I hope their quality assurance is Europe based.
Honestly though, I will watch the answers here.
They were never really sold as competing with a Nexus 5, and most people weren't buying a Nexus 5. (Even so, it was still ~20% cheaper.) People were looking at a OPO against a Galaxy S4/S5 and the other flagships that were all more than twice the price.
It was "marketing aura" in the sense that they took a phone that would have normally only appealed to developers/phone geeks and managed to market it to the masses to some extent.
But it wasn't _just_ marketing aura just because there was one other phone on the market that could compete with it. It was a legitimately good offering at the time when a Samsung cost twice as much and their offerings in that price range had seen so little care and attention as to be barely functional in many ways.
Still I am holding off on it as there are too many issues on various forums. I don't think there's anything I'm missing from Android 11 (yet.)
I'm never getting a phone without an armor again. That thing has fallen so many times on hard concrete and is completely untouched.
I'm afraid too much critical thinking has been off loaded to corporations through advertisement. Sure, it is just a phone, but for many of these people the $1k price tag is a major part of their disposable income and I don't think enough thought is being given to the far cheaper alternatives.
Not only has it been reduced to two options, the two options have become two of the most expensive options. I don't think this was by chance.
Fashionistas see you the same way when it comes to clothes. Car people see you this way about cars. Furniture people about furniture. Photography nuts about photo gear, knife people about kitchen knives, restaurant critics about restaurants, and the list goes on. Let’s not even get into what audiophiles think of most of our speaker and headphone choices ...
Life is too short to be an expert at everything. Too short to even care about most purchases when good enough is plenty.
Look up satisficing vs maximizing.
I keep hearing this adage of "iPhone as a status symbol" and I have legitimately never in my life seen it. Only ever saw people on the internet talking about it.
An anecdotal data point for you, if it's useful.
It might not be a status symbol in the US and Europe but in the rest of the world it definitely is. I’ve lived in the uk for a while and no one cared that was wearing an iPhone. But as soon as I moved back to my home country everyone thinks I’m rich. And they’re right to think this way as the price of iPhones in my country is completely absurd.
Everyone thinks an 800 pounds phone is expensive?
Imagine if you had to pay almost double of that. In a country that receives less than 200 hundred pounds of monthly minimum wage.
I would never buy an iPhone while living here. It makes no sense unless you really want it as a status symbol.
I buy an iPhone for a number of reasons. I recognize it's expensive but it's usually at least a 3-year investment and to be fair, the cost per annum is basically the same for most Android flagships, only that Apple users switch devices less often.
This can likely be endlessly contested by the frugal folk but I am not here for that.
My reasons actually are highly irrelevant. I shared an anecdote about very regular non-tech people. They keep telling me the same stories after they switch from Android to iPhone and that's not accidental.
But again, cost of living in the country of residence doesn't mean much if you work remotely.
> It makes no sense unless you really want it as a status symbol.
You could have just said: "I am an Apple hater" and it would have saved us both time and keystrokes. :)
But if you’re convinced that your choice is superior then you do you. I’m not here to argue, only to provide info of what I did and what many others I know did as well.
- two-party government,
- two major desktop OSs (macOS and Windows),
- two main mobile OSs (android and iOS),
- two major phone manufacturers (Apple and Samsung),
- two main internet browsers (Chrome and Firefox),
- two mainstream cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum),
- two major home internet providers (Verizon and Comcast)
- two ...
There are exceptions of course, esp. in the retail market and fast food industry, but I'm afraid the good-ol' times choices in many areas are mostly gone.
I remember seeing GQ articles that were interviews with celebrities that was kind of a "30 questions" thing where each celebrity was asked the same set of questions.
One of them was: "iPhone or Samsung?"
It didn't matter that the answer to every single one (in that issue) was iPhone. It didn't surprise me that celebrities would be 100% iPhone users.
But as a discerning high-end android buyer gravitating between flagship Google Nexus devices, HTC, and LG, the implication that the alternative to iPhone was "Samsung" was BEWILDERING to me.
She goes and names three top parties herself and predicts that one particular party will win. I was surprised.. Asked her why she think so and says she sees more ads of that particular party more than others.. i was beyond words.
We should all also do our part to end the political ad insanity. This can't be healthy for anyone.
I remember when we went to my grandmas house, and the media was talking about a ‘major crisis’ in the White House, like they do every day.
Our seven-year-old suddenly got concerned and has to be calmed down, because she is so rarely exposed to American media.
I feel bad for this generation, and I’m not surprised that almost half of our senior high school girls (at least on one sports team) are on anti-anxiety medication.
Advertising is almost always a thread of a lie, so reducing exposure to that until children are more mature is probably a good idea.
A few points:
Samsung is not cool. Or rather, maybe a little bit among some very middle/lower class people.
Selling mobiles is done primarily through carriers - this is not about Samsung direct advertising mostly, by and large, it's through the deals made with carriers.
Google has never taken their phone and it's manufacturing/distribution as seriously as Samsung.
Carriers may have also specifically not wanted Google to win, because it gives G too much power, they hate Apple and don't want to have to be told what to do.
Samsung has always had a huge variety of phones, a much bigger and broader approach.
They have always led with a kind of crappy, thrown-together feature, but it was enough to put some wrap a bad campaign around good enough for a bulk of the Android community.
Within the bundled packages, my impression is that Samsung is very dominant as well among the Android phones.
LG on the other hand was up and down. I think LG was the one that needed marketing since they always lost their fans and had to bring in new people
LG was constantly shifting markets. I had a G2 and really liked it. I would have bought other devices from them, but the things that appealed to me about the G2 disappeared in most future products.
Constant shifts in focus gained share but also lost share at the same time. They really needed a cohesive line.
At that point, any feature LG introduce are gonna be labeled as gimmicky, because they never develop it further for their next phone
Edit: For example, people love LG's KnockON feature.
> With Knock ON you can set the phone to turn the screen on by quickly double-tapping the screen. Double-tap an empty area in the Home screen, Status Bar, or Lock screen to turn the screen off.
-- https://www.lg.com/us/support/help-library/lg-android-knock-...
[1] https://www.samsung.com/sg/support/mobile-devices/how-to-qui...
Flagship prices seem completely ridiculous these days for minor improvements over the previous year's models or even their second-tier offerings. But consumers put such a premium on having the newest shiniest thing that the previous year's model can frequently be had for less than half the price.
Looking at unlocked iPhone retail prices for the iPhone 4 in 2011, flagship pricing has increased 3-4x the inflation rate for the same period of time.
Same goes for HTC. Buy once, cry once, hodl that shit for half a decade on the short side.
For example, a store called Safeway decided to cut out an older version of Android. However, they reversed less than a month later.
Speaking of marketing, I think LG does market quite a bit inside the Republic of Korea. I saw a show called oh my ghost and everyone had an LG phone in the show.
The problem is compounded by the fact that every manufacturer has their own schedule for security updates. Just because Android got a widely publicized security patch doesn't mean that their phones will get it any time soon. By the time they do, nobody remembers what it's for.
I used to use Xiaomi's flagship and it seemed to have fairly regular updates, but every time I installed one it would replace all of my preferences and default to using their own replacements apps instead of stock Android apps that I preferred. I finally had to get rid of it way before the end of its useful lifespan because there there seemed to be a whole lot of issues surrounding its customization of Android. The deal breaker was after an update when I stopped receiving text messages reliably. Sometimes they'd come through immediately, sometimes a few minutes late, and a few days a week they wouldn't come in at all until either 1) I rebooted 2) I lost and then regained cell signal 3) I airplane mode on then off.
I tried all sorts of work arounds, suggested fixes from browsing forums, etc., nothing worked. I liked the phone, but it just got too stressful for work: My boss is respectful of normal business hours, but during the day still relies heavily on text messaging for requests, urgent issues, etc.
I was pissed off at having to put out money for a new phone so early, so I went with the budget Pixel 4a, and honestly I don't see much of a performance hit at all, even though it's about 25% worse on CPU specs. And even though the camera specs are much lower, it takes much better photos. At this point, I'm a convert to 2nd tier Pixel phones.
I believe my next phone will be a glorious fruit device, probably a second hand one.
Here, LG is best known for household appliances and the Gram line of ultralight laptops. It's a running joke that even Samsung stores use LG air conditioners. Samsung appliances are for people who can't afford LG. When it comes to phones, though, it's the other way around just like in the rest of the world.
That's product placement?
(And given how little many people actually install new apps etc, I wonder how large the attack surface really is - but I have no data on that)
"It's just marketing" is an age old refrain from tech people. As a group, we still haven't figured out that marketing works and matters. Nor have we figured out the kinds of features that lead successful products.
especially mid range a lot of phone produces washed, sad mockery of pictures unless you're under the sunniest day conditions, and even then skin and faces get garbled by the ai-thingy lot of them sports. this does matter to a lot of consumers.
I think most importantly is Samsung's image presence vs LG. Can't remember the last time I've seen a TV advert for LG. Or a billboard in the city center, or youtube hype from influencers, etc. While Samsung is everywhere.
Second is the cool factor. LG has none while Samsung have this as a priority. From the design of the phones to their special physical presence in malls.
People often ask me (as an IT guy) to recommend a phone. But they always have their mind made up by the time they ask and Samsung is the choice. The other options don't look as good, are considered a risk vs a known, and are also seen as a budget choice for those who can't afford a Samsung. Sometimes I feel they would be even ashamed of having people see them with anything "less".