• @danielfgom
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    10 months ago

    I don’t think it will be a loss leader because phones at this price are specced the same or better. Plus they are making them in India, which is super cheap. I think this is aimed at filling up the bank account with much needed cash as well as massively expanding the customer base.

    This is what I said they should have done last year when the 2 came out. Many times I commented and complained on socials and YouTube, even directly to Carl, that the 2 was way too expensive and not many will buy it. What they needed was a cheaper, mass appeal phone to build the brand and customer base.

    Well I was right. They sold 60 000 in the first hour and revealed that phone 1 AND phone 2 sales COMBINED never reached 100 000 units…

    That phone 2 barely sold. Exactly as I said. He had to lick his wounds and learn his lesson. He thought he could just come out and compete with Apple, Samsung and the rest just because his phone looks like an iPhone… Think again.

    They subsequently went on to sell 100 000+ of the 2a on that first day, which is a very strong start and injected massive cash into the business.

    Let’s see if the sales continue but at that price they are least will be looked at by consumers as an option, which wasn’t the case with 1 or 2 due to their high pricing.

    Must have been very uncomfortable explaining himself to investors after the phone 1 and 2 failures…

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      I don’t think it will be a loss leader because phones at this price are specced the same or better.

      They might have one or two better specs but the package at that price is pretty good. The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is more expensive, has a fuck ton of bloatware and launched with Android 13 out of the box. Also has that idiotic curved display and terrible auxiliary cameras. The Poco X6 Pro has a much faster SoC but the cameras are not as good as HyperOS is essentially a more refined version of MIUI.

      I agree the 2 was too expensive. It got a drastic price increase compared to the 1 without upgrading too much. What they should have done is released a 2 around the same price as the 1 and released a Pro version if they wanted to sell a phone with a bigger profit margin.

      • @danielfgom
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        210 months ago

        Yes the 2a definitely stands out with it’s design and cameras in this segment.

        Ok some reviews I’ve seen and the camera was really bad. Others said it was ok. Another said it was inconsistent - sometimes they got great shots and other times terrible shots.

        They definitely have work to do in the camera department but tbh all OEM’s struggle with this. It took Apple and Samsung years to make their cameras good so Nothing will need time with that.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          I feel the cameras are better than the majority of the competition at that price if the Pixel 7a is excluded. I agree they’re nothing special but Xiaomi’s shots are overexposed and they insist on throwing a rubbish 8 MP ultrawide on everything that’s not their flagship number series.

          I also am not a fan of Samsung’s image processing, feel they oversharpen too much. Pixel is probably the safest option if still images are the most important thing unless one is willing to go through some hassle to get the Vivo X100 Pro, Oppo Find X7 Ultra or Xiaomi 14 Ultra. I feel those cameras are the best purely because of the hardware that is in them. For video, Apple are still the best with Samsung a distant second.

      • @keyez
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        210 months ago

        I got a phone 2 3 months ago and it was at least $100 cheaper than a similar pixel or Samsung that was available

        • @[email protected]
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          10 months ago

          Really depends on the location. In North America and Western Europe, it costs about as much as a OnePlus 12R which has a better chip, bigger battery and will get updates for longer. In the US, that’s after discounts. There were times you could get an S23 for the same price which isn’t a good comparison for the Phone 2 unless the bigger display,better battery life and unlockable bootloader are more important than IP68 water and dust resistance, a faster chip and an offline presence.