[centilliard]

The best 'cheap' phone that was ever released in the US was the $499 Google Nexus 6P by Huawei in 2015. It was an octa-core phone that made Apple's dual core iPhone 6s (also released in 2015) look like an overpriced joke. The 6P's aluminum body was lighter and thinner than the iPhone 6s, its camera took much better pictures _by far_ especially in low light conditions (restaurants, evening travel, etc), the iPhone's old backlit IPS LCD screen had _nothing_ on 6P's gorgeous AMOLED. It took Apple 2 years to catch up to the 6P, with their iPhone X, and even then it didn't beat the 6P in every category. It was a beast of a phone. Mine finally died last year after 2 years of heavy use and 4 years of being a backup phone.

See for yourself: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=7588&idPhone2...

[mdasen]

> It was an octa-core phone that made Apple's dual core iPhone 6s (also released in 2015) look like an overpriced joke

The iPhone 6s gets a single-core Geekbench of 528 while the Nexus 6P gets 208. The Nexus 6P's multi-core score was 520 - less then the iPhone 6s' single-core score. The iPhone 6s' multi-core score was 970 - 87% higher than the Nexus 6P.

Yep, it had 8 cores. Good for it. It was still a lot slower.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9820/the-google-nexus-6p-revi...

AnandTech also found it a lot slower. Mozilla's Kraken web browser benchmark took 2.4x longer on the Nexus 6P. The iPhone scored around 1.9x higher on Google's Octane benchmark.

It's really hard to argue with Apple's superior processor performance. I guess if you're looking for more cores with inferior performance, the Nexus 6P fits the bill. MORE CORES!

[centilliard]

I had expected 8 slower cores to outperform the 2 slightly faster cores in multi-core benchmarks, so the results are somewhat surprising, but I guess Apple's wide pipeline design keeps on giving. Thanks for the benchmark data.

For what it's worth, the statement you quoted did not initially contain the number of cores. 6P felt super snappy (at least on Android 6, not so much on Oreo) and I added the cores for dramatic effect, but that backfired. I'll leave it as-is so others can notice and learn from my mistake once they read your reply.

[wonderbore]

Man it's been a while since I read someone comparing raw specs. Android phones always looked better on paper but sucked compared to the iPhone experience in every way. I don't even say this as an Apple user because I tried so many times to switch to Android when I looked at the specs myself.

Even before the iPhone I looked at the brand new 2G, no GPS, 240p screen, 1Mpx camera iPhone and laughed from my "old" 3G/VGA/GPS/2Mpx Windows Phone. Until I tried the iPhone and there was no going back.

[centilliard]

I'll give you a pass on the Apple fanboism, seeing as you made the poor judgment call to get a Windows phone ;)

On second thought, are you sure you're not still holding your iPhone wrong?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/25/iphone.problems.re...

[skinnymuch]

Windows Phone 7 was awesome

[cloverich]

My wife and I loved ours, but both bootloop suicided at the 13 and 15 month mark. _Both_. Out of warranty by 1 and 2 months. That was my official departure from Android (which I otherwise loved). I've never had a problem with the 6 iPhones I have owned (3 before, 3 after) -- but ironically my Wife's second iPhone after _also_ suicided. She somehow negotiated a free replacement 6 months out of warranty, so iPhone still came out ahead. I had a pretty good experience with the Nexus 5 (my favorite for its time) and the Pixel 2 (not my favorite form factor, otherwise great).

Both make great phones but having a popular phone has a really killer feature where it works out a lot of bugs. Not perfect, but I think if iPhones had the same level of issue as the Nexus 6 there'd be an extended warranty or something comparable.

[addled]

My wife enjoyed her 6P, then it died prematurely of bootloop. As did the warranty replacement one.

Got a double payout from the eventual class action suit.

[roneythomas6]

I agree with your comment. The camera was really impressive and it was first nexus phone where the camera outperformed an iPhone. But I think the video quality wasn’t that great when compared to iPhone. Mine started shutting down prematurely in Canadian winter after more than a year of use. But Google replaced mine for free even after the 1yr warranty expired. Ended up with Pixel 2 which had even better camera than Nexus 6P. The first iPhone to outperform Pixel 2 for low light was the iPhone 11. But during those times the video quality really sucked on both Nexus and Pixel, which it still does to the day.

[MonaroVXR]

I don't agree with you, since a friend and had the iPhone 6s Plus and 7 Plus (Me) and a friend if mine the Huawei P9 Plus and the 6P, 6P was nowhere. The best shot was taken in black white with the Huawei P9 Plus and it literally beat my iPhones and I still use that picture for several things.

[centilliard]

I'm a bit confused. If you're trying to say that Huawei's P9 (released in 2016) took better pictures than Huawei's 6P (released in 2015) and than the iPhones, then I don't think there's anything to disagree over. They both took better pictures than the iPhones, seeing as they're both Huawei phones released shortly one after the other.

Now that I think about it, you might be saying that P9 was more wide-spread in the US than the 6P, which would also be confusing, because I don't think the P9 was officially sold in the US.

[rr888]

I had a 6p it was great but cheap construction. First battery wore out after 9 months, second one wasn't much longer, especially in the cold. Lots of other people had hardware problems, it was rare to see them after a few years.