High end phones are way too expensive

Lenovo laptops are the WORST. I bought one for my wife and an OEM update made it unusable. Then removing the bloat made it even more unusable.

It took a lot creativity to get it back into working condition. Lenovo never responded to my emails for support and their online tech help wanted me to pay to send it in...
 
Consumers are willing buy $800+ phones so companies will continue to raise prices if there is a demand for them. I'm more than happy with a $400 phone that has almost the same capabilities as an $800 phone.
 
I recently had an issue with a Lenovo laptop, so I perused the Lenovo forums. Lots of complaints there about the Moto G. Numerous problems. Lack of support. Etc.

This applies to every phone maker
 
They are out there, just not out as fast as the phones since less people go for them. The S8 has one, though I think it may use the screen behind it so not a full stand alone keyboard.
Well, if there's a good one for the Note 4 out there somewhere, I'd like to see it.

The real question is whether or not the upcoming Note 8 gets one.

Also, what you're describing sounds like the Note 5 clip-on keyboard overlay to me, which is an automatic fail simply for using up valuable screen real estate and most likely not being backlit. The appeal of slider keyboards like the Priv is that they DON'T compromise screen space on top of being very tactile, something the recent KEYone screws up.
 
I've noticed that Samsung keeps ramping up the price of recent Galaxy Note models while still not providing everything that my current Galaxy Note 4 can do (removable battery and IR blaster, most notably), and it's something of a point of irritation along with their current design direction.

Yet nobody else even offers a Wacom pen or something of that caliber in their flagship phones, so I'm stuck with one vendor that effectively stabbed customers like me in the back the past two years, with this year not likely to be much different.

I was tempted to run my Note 4 in tandem with a BlackBerry Priv because I like physical keyboards and all (and can't find cases that add them to the usual flagships any more), but that thing's probably about to lose out on updates and is too locked-down to be updated by the community. It's too bad you can't update an Android phone like a typical IBM-compatible PC descendant because of non-standard bootloaders and drivers and all that crap.

Curious how Samsung stabbed you in the back? You expect 2017 phones to have removable batteries? Looks like LG has a few with removable but no one else does? wonder why. I have a note 4 and I used to love always having battery charged ready to switch. The only reason I enjoyed removable was because the phone only lasted 12 hours on a charge at the most. moto G was great phone but its only worth 30-50$ :)
 
Lenovo laptops are the WORST. I bought one for my wife and an OEM update made it unusable. Then removing the bloat made it even more unusable.

It took a lot creativity to get it back into working condition. Lenovo never responded to my emails for support and their online tech help wanted me to pay to send it in...
was it an IdeaPad or a Thinkpad?
 
Pixel gets a price cut....

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sl...epares-you-to-go-back-to-school-07494219/amp/

Thanks to this seasonal promo, the Google Pixel XL is now $200 cheaper, previously $769 but can now be yours for only $569. The smaller Google Pixel also gets a smaller $125 discount, from $649 down to $524. But if you put in an order now, you also have the chance to get a free Daydream View VR headset. Simply put in both a Pixel and a Daydream View in the shopping card and get the latter completely free. As long as supplies last that is.
 
Curious how Samsung stabbed you in the back? You expect 2017 phones to have removable batteries? Looks like LG has a few with removable but no one else does? wonder why. I have a note 4 and I used to love always having battery charged ready to switch. The only reason I enjoyed removable was because the phone only lasted 12 hours on a charge at the most. moto G was great phone but its only worth 30-50$ :)
The removable battery is only part of it.

-The Note 5 dropped that, the microSD slot AND the IR blaster. Yes, I actually use that last one, given the amount of things I've picked up that didn't come with their respective remotes.

And of all those features, only the microSD slot came back on the Note 7.

-Samsung keeps shoving that curved screen fetish of theirs down our throats! Like, fine, make the S series flagships fashionable if you want, but there's a reason drawing tablets don't have their active area edges rounded off!

The Note 7 didn't give us a choice in the matter, and it's doubtful the Note 8 will either. Meanwhile, the old Note Edge that kicked this off had it as ADDITIONAL screen area, and if you didn't feel like that was worth paying for, you had the standard Note 4.

-Before, Sprint and T-Mobile users here in the US could flash custom ROMs to their heart's content due to unlocked bootloaders. Verizon users had to pay the premium for a Developer Edition. AT&T users were just screwed.

Then with the S7, Samsung just locked the (now single, thankfully) North American variant down across the board. Even Sprint and T-Mobile got the shaft! I have my doubts there's going to be much in the way of Note 8 development if they keep that up.

I just feel that ever since the S6, Samsung contracted bitten fruit syndrome and decided to start making their phones expensive fashion statements at the expense of power user functionality. Damn shame, really.
 
Meh, make $5000 phones. Make $5000 i7's and ryzens. Bring on the $10,000 video cards. Its all about how far behind the curve you want to be.

Regardless of how much you spend, its going to be about 5" of screen, multi core, and about 4 hours of screen on time.
 
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I just feel that ever since the S6, Samsung contracted bitten fruit syndrome and decided to start making their phones expensive fashion statements at the expense of power user functionality. Damn shame, really.

Just since the S6? :p Samsung has been illustrating Apple envy since the original Galaxy S.

To me, the more explicitly Apple-ish bent as of late stems from a couple of factors. Samsung rightly got blasted for its phone design, at least around the S3-S5 era. It was way, way too fond of using cheap-feeling plastic, especially to imitate quality materials like metal or leather. It was hard to fall in love with a Galaxy S4 when its design had all the passion of a commercial washing machine... and who can forget the fake stitching on the Galaxy Note 3?

The other concern was simply the market reality. Apple's knack is for designing products that are relatively immune to that race-to-the-bottom pressure that you see in phones, PCs and other categories. Samsung clearly wanted a larger piece of that "safe" high-end market, especially as Chinese vendors ate its lunch at the low end. The answer: build a phone that at least looks and feels like a premium device, even if it involves some compromises. I suspect Samsung struggled during the S6 era both because this was too new, and because it ditched too much of what Samsung buyers were used to. Not that removable batteries and microSD cards are must-haves, but losing both in one year was probably a bit much at a time when it was hard to find variants with more than the base 32GB storage.
 
I guess it's all perspective at this point. If people continue to buy, the likes of apple, Samsung etc will contiune to push the upper limits for "premium handsets"
 
I am an unusual case in that using the smartphone for business makes it a tax deduction. Which makes the expense a lot less painful to bear. Also, need the camera to be good (again part of the business) and those have historically been flagship features. But given how good the cameras are getting on mid-range devices it is easy to see why those have such good sales potential going forward. Companies like Motorola and Huawei could end up taking lots of marketshare from Apple and Samsung in the future with "almost as good" devices.
 
Samsung rightly got blasted for its phone design, at least around the S3-S5 era. It was way, way too fond of using cheap-feeling plastic, especially to imitate quality materials like metal or leather. It was hard to fall in love with a Galaxy S4 when its design had all the passion of a commercial washing machine... and who can forget the fake stitching on the Galaxy Note 3?

Not by everyone, I loved my S4, it did not weigh a ton, was easy to swap some parts out being able to remove the back and it being made of plastic made it a little more durable. My S4 fell from 50 to 75 feet off my old quad copter and was just fine other than a little crack on the back plate. My S5 provided from work has had a few tumbles and lived without any issue.

There is a trade off. People wanted premium looking devices well now they have a phone made entirely of glass... So many are cracked and broken. Sorry, I would rather plastic over a 900 dollar phone that is broken in 5 minutes. I don't mind loosing the replaceable battery, annoyed as I did swap them out but whatever. If they were truly going for good design they could pull it off and make it out of a much better materiel.

I am still considering the Note 8 or S9 but only with a skin, I may not go with them because of the glass and cost but we'll see.
 
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I've had my ZTE Axon 7 64GB for a couple/few months now, and I love it. $380 Prime ship from Amazon (now $450). I thought I'd miss having the removable battery so I could put a monstrosity of an extended battery in like I was able to with my previous two phones (LG G3, Samsung S3), but the USB 3C and QC3 make it moot: using a Qualcomm QC3 Certified 24W charger in my car (Anker A2210011), I finally have a phone that will actually show a positive battery charge while running a constant-screen-time app like Scout Nav. I saw zero need to pay double for a "big brand" phone such as one from Apple, Samsung, LG, Google, etc.
 
To suggest that ZTE is a tiny brand simply because they sell cheap phones is completely fallacious. ZTE is one of the biggest brands in the world! ZTE at one point was the 3rd biggest phone manufacturer - lost that title to Huawei since, but they still sell a ton of phones and other networking products.
 
Not by everyone, I loved my S4, it did not weigh a ton, was easy to swap some parts out being able to remove the back and it being made of plastic made it a little more durable. My S4 fell from 50 to 75 feet off my old quad copter and was just fine other than a little crack on the back plate. My S5 provided from work has had a few tumbles and lived without any issue.

There is a trade off. People wanted premium looking devices well now they have a phone made entirely of glass... So many are cracked and broken. Sorry, I would rather plastic over a 900 dollar phone that is broken in 5 minutes. I don't mind loosing the replaceable battery, annoyed as I did swap them out but whatever. If they were truly going for good design they could pull it off and make it out of a much better materiel.

I am still considering the Note 8 or S9 but only with a skin, I may not go with them because of the glass and cost but we'll see.

Yup, I'd prefer a more durable plastic or poly-carbonate phone that's much more easy to repair as well than the glass and aluminum slabs that OEMs are putting out now. I couldn't give a damn about what my phone looks like as long as it works and is comfortable to use. I'm going to put a thin TPU case on it anyways too just for a little added protection, as my thinnish Supcases have saved my last few phones several times from moderate spills onto cement and concrete. I like putting glass screen protectors on my phones too for added protection and they have saved mine and my wife's displays a few times now as well. Those glass screen protectors are nearly impossible to fit well on any of Samsung's phones with rounded edges, I've only seen one that works well and it's a $60 kit that you have to spend at least an hour on prepping and installing because of those awkward edges, and those edges are the very thing that make the phone so delicate in the first place compared to phones that have a standard housing/bezel around the display. All just to look pretty..? No thanks, I'll stick with function over form any day.

Now if only Samsung would get out of bed with AT&T and bring their Active phones to the rest of the carriers/world so people that don't care about aesthetics and thinness can have a durable phone with a big battery.
 
Just since the S6? :p Samsung has been illustrating Apple envy since the original Galaxy S.

To me, the more explicitly Apple-ish bent as of late stems from a couple of factors. Samsung rightly got blasted for its phone design, at least around the S3-S5 era. It was way, way too fond of using cheap-feeling plastic, especially to imitate quality materials like metal or leather. It was hard to fall in love with a Galaxy S4 when its design had all the passion of a commercial washing machine... and who can forget the fake stitching on the Galaxy Note 3?

The other concern was simply the market reality. Apple's knack is for designing products that are relatively immune to that race-to-the-bottom pressure that you see in phones, PCs and other categories. Samsung clearly wanted a larger piece of that "safe" high-end market, especially as Chinese vendors ate its lunch at the low end. The answer: build a phone that at least looks and feels like a premium device, even if it involves some compromises. I suspect Samsung struggled during the S6 era both because this was too new, and because it ditched too much of what Samsung buyers were used to. Not that removable batteries and microSD cards are must-haves, but losing both in one year was probably a bit much at a time when it was hard to find variants with more than the base 32GB storage.
Well, everyone was envying Apple for a long while, but Samsung didn't compromise function too much in favor of form until the S6.

No, I haven't forgotten about the cheap plastic on the S3 (glossy back that scuffs and scratches painfully easily, plastic frame that cracks around the USB port without even trying), or the fake stitching on the Note 3, but here's what pisses me off: nobody really praised Samsung for the Galaxy Alpha's design due to being a mid-ranger when everyone only cares about flagships, and that phone is what the Note 4 is modeled after.

Both of those phones have an aluminum edge frame that looks very nice out of the box (albeit scuffing and scratching too easily in practice), but still have a solid plastic back that was reasonably textured, held on tight, and yet didn't really feel cheap. They felt nice, and you could still remove the battery and add things like an extended battery with a fatter backplate or a Qi wireless charging backplate. To me, the Alpha and Note 4 were proof that you could have that premium feel without giving up function.

But no, everyone only goes gaga on the S6 and everything after. It probably doesn't help that a lot of these people unironically consider the iPhone 4 one of the best-looking designs because of its glass back, even though that's also the very phone that spawned the "you're holding it wrong" meme due to a design flaw with the cellular antennae on the edges.
 
Phones are like most tech in that as you go up the price range, it's diminishing returns in terms of the actual benefits. Personally, I have a phone that cost £120 (Wileyfox Swift 2) and is probably 90% as good as a flagship phone costing six times the price. That's not going to be for everyone, but it's a no-brainer for me.
 
If a carrier was to bring back good customer service (old t mobile) and offered high end free phones for contracts again, I would switch and never leave.

I would pay a premium over other lesser experiences from the current crop of shitty carriers. Charge me 20 bucks more a month, give me good customer service and free phones every 2 years. I am sure that's a workable model. Capitalism needs to get back to catering to customers not forcing us to take what we can get.
 
Meh, make $5000 phones. Make $5000 i7's and ryzens. Bring on the $10,000 video cards. Its all about how far behind the curve you want to be.

Regardless of how much you spend, its going to be about 5" of screen, multi core, and about 4 hours of screen on time.
Nice summary of modern phones.

They have 2k USD flip phones in China. And I hate most phones yet want one because buttons and style >_<

Only things in past years that have caught my eye arethe dual eink/ips phones and the dual screen clamshell/flip phones as mentioned above and maybe the few with expandable battery. Everything else has been same old same old incremental update since the SGS2/Iphone 4 or so.
 
To suggest that ZTE is a tiny brand simply because they sell cheap phones is completely fallacious. ZTE is one of the biggest brands in the world! ZTE at one point was the 3rd biggest phone manufacturer - lost that title to Huawei since, but they still sell a ton of phones and other networking products.

I never said that. Focus on the words I put in quotes near the end of my post. ;)
 
Why do you need a high end phone? It's like complaining that Ferraris are expensive. No one needs a Ferrari.
 
Why do you need a high end phone? It's like complaining that Ferraris are expensive. No one needs a Ferrari.

Kind of a bad analogy.. not every Tom, Dick, and Harry can finance a Ferrari for ~$35/month from their local dealership. No one needs an iPhone, but this is why you see most tweens and their parents running around with them.
 
How about you reread what you posted. Maybe you wrote it incorrectly

"Big brand" in quotes...to highlight that ZTE isn't a brand most people in the US would know, but they are certainly familiar with brands like Apple, LG, Samsung, etc. Make sense now?
 
The difference in smartphone market share of LG and ZTE is less than 1%, while LG is certainly the far more recognizable brand.
 
I'm ok if companies make things I can't afford. Seems to be a lot of that given my financial status.

People aren't out here screaming that Ferraris and Maseraties are too dang expensive, and it's not like you ~need~ a smartphone to survive. If you can't afford it, you don't buy it.
 
The difference in smartphone market share of LG and ZTE is less than 1%, while LG is certainly the far more recognizable brand.

Brand recognition...precisely what I mean. John or Jane Average Consumer doesn't give a crap about market share as long as their usual go-to brand comes out with a shiny new smartphone model every year. I've yet to see people camping out for days to get the latest ZTE like they do the Galaxy or iPhone.
 
Regardless of how much you spend, its going to be about 5" of screen, multi core, and about 4 hours of screen on time.

My Huawei Mate 9 disagrees... Seriously though, love this phone and their upcoming Mate 10 looks to be amazing too. They make some nice phones!

Screenshot_20170812-171048.png
 
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It is the Apple effect. Form over functionally is more important to people. Most people don't even use most of what these high end phones have to offer and just care about the logo on the back. The S5 is the last of its kind from Samsung. I would still be using mine if my Sister-in-Law didn't crush it.
 
You have to keep in mind that there is often still residual value if you treat your phone well that you can trade in/sell. I tend to upgrade every two years. For example, I went from a Moto X to a Nexus 6P then now to an S8+. I bought the 6P for $325 on Newegg and then just sold it for ~$300 just this Friday ($250ish after fees/shipping). I then bought a Samsung S8+ for $525 new with various ebay promos. If you are a bit tech savvy and know when to buy sales and when to sell (before the next new things are released), cost of ownership of tech is often quite low. I can afford to spend ~100/year on a phone.

This is true with graphics cards and other electronic parts. I frequently buy a part, use it for <1 year and then sell it and even make money sometimes (especially true this time thanks to mining) but still true in general. Owning relatively new tech doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.
 
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