this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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I miss the days when a flagship phone was $300-350.
The $300-$350 range of phones today blows the "flagships" of a bygone era out of the water.
Just keep spending $300-$350. No body is forcing you to shell out for the extras.
I want my Galaxy S5 back. AUX port, removable battery, waterproof, easily rooted, and had an IR blaster.
Those days never existed. Even the first iPhones were like $500 and that was over a decade ago.
These prices are very high but phones last a lot longer than they used to and are improving a lot slower. I just bought a Pixel 8 for £400 which (accounting for inflation) is about the same price as we used to pay for three old Pixels and even Nexuses.
E.g. the Nexus 4 which was considered "mega cheap" was £279 for the 16GB model, which is £390 in today's money.
They're clearly going for price differentiation based on the model year, but you really don't need the latest model to have an amazing phone any more.
The fist iPhones weren't flagships.
They lacked most normal higher end stuff, were buggy, and brought nothing new.
iPhone 4+ were actual competitors, but things like a decent camera & battery were still generations away.
Lol what. Do you know what a flagship is?
How old are you? This is very obviously complete nonsense to anyone who was around at the time.
What are you taking about?
Ok screen but not for the intent, no 3G (only edge), an impossibly shitty camera (fixed focus 2MP main camera, no auto focus, bad auto settings, didn't even support recording videos, no optical or digital zoom, neither xenon nor led flash ... and no front cam at all so no videocals either ofc), couldn't even send MMS (you could only email your pics, maybe?), OS was also clunky & limited, no free transfers from desktops without going through Apple software, and even then you couldn't do the simplest things (like custom ringtones where on eg Symbian you just pointed it to whatever mp3 or other audio files).
What it did have is better touch screen than any other phone & a snappy interface (imho the most notable achievement of that phone, prob the result of like 5 devs & 50 project managers screaming at then, gg to the devs).
The full on touchscreen phones of the era (I member Sony Ericsson P900, P910, and P990 from 2003, 2004, and 2005) were quite laggy when for example starring apps or scrolling though images or whatnot.
At the time two year old Nokias (obsolete basically, hehe), had better specs and everything listed above (prob forgot some things). But ultimately I just couldn't go back from having a phone with 5MP cam with autofocus & Carl Zeiss optics. The era of me taking pics of all the thighs for be began in like 2002 with first camera phones.
Same with 3G, that was basically having internet everywhere, a mobile modem (via USB). I remember I played Quake over it just for fun (I had 100+ ms ping so not great, especially bcs we got optical fiber net around that year).
iPhones took gens/years to even get front camera, video recording, MMS, and other basic functionality - til 2009 or whenever the sexy 4th gen came out.
If you didn't mean 'flagship with features' then those titanium Nokias were also fancy. And ofc BlackBerry for texting & emailing.
Also a flagship is the big ship that usually floats on water, but that is not important right now.
Edit:
oh, I forget Japan had some crazy good phones around that time, I member seeing DoCoMo phones with nice screens, games, etc.
I miss the days when they'd give you a free phone for signing your cell service contract. Now they're like "but we don't make you sign a contract any more!". Bullshit. If you cancel service they demand full payment for the phone immediately. They still have people locked in. Granted, you can always get 0% interest directly from the manufacturer, but a lot of people don't qualify for that.
Same :(
But do you need a flagship? I think 90+% of the people don't actually need it and can use last years midrange instead.