It was comparable in price to the Edge 40 in India which was the only market it was launched in at the time of the comment. The European price is over the top but it should probably get price cuts soon.

There were rumours about "Dream Chip" i.e. Samsung Mobile designing their own chip. Exynos is designed by Samsung LSI, they're part of the same conglomerate but there is a lot of internal competition apparently. Might explain why the Samsung OLED panel on iPhones is sometimes ahead of the Samsung OLED panel on Samsung flagships.

True, although you'd have to pay quite a bit extra to get 7 years of updates as this phone is half the MSRP of a Pixel 8. The 7a is a year old now so it'll likely only get two more years of OS updates and four years of security patches. Tbf it is good Nothing are providing 3 updates since the phone is $300 in India and €349 in Europe. The Poco X6 Pro matches the update commitment but MIUI had a reputation for being buggy outside China. HyperOS (MIUI's successor) also has ads in system apps and a lot of pre-loaded bloatware. It does have a faster chip and storage compared to the Phone 2a though so there are pros and cons to both devices.

All Sony phones (including their flagships) get two years of OS updates and three years of security patches. That's rumoured to change this year but the Xperia 1 III and 5 III are not getting Android 14.

First of all sorry for the delayed reply but i only got the notification a few hours back for some reason.

I wouldn't go as far as to claim that "more cameras" is the complaints being made here.

It is one of the most common complaints cited against buying a smaller phone especially in tech enthusiast circles. Some people say they ended up getting the bigger phone because it had better cameras or the presence of the telephoto was enough.

I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work.

We'll have to disagree. Apple have been one of the best at maintaining equality between a larger phone and a smaller phone in recent times since they manufacture phones in enough volume to actually care about miniaturizing components. The minis had feature parity with the regular iPhones of that year. The Pros are larger but they've maintained feature parity with the Pro Max in most instances except for the 12 Pro/12 Pro Max and 15 Pro/15 Pro Max. Even with those two instances the only difference was in the cameras. I'll acknowledge there's no fair comparison with Google or Samsung but that's only because they don't make a smaller Pro/Ultra phone. Even if they did, I'm fairly sure the cameras would be different.

1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.

In the volumes Apple sells, that probably equates to a couple of million units. 5% would not be a very attractive proposition for other manufacturers since they'd need to increase profit margins to actually make money from making a smaller phone as they deal with much smaller volumes.

Realme 12 Pro+ does what you're asking for but availability is limited to a few countries. Design may still be considered fancy though.

Not... Really... Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they're one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.

There's isn't enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it's the size of the iPhone mini. They can fit them on a 6.1-6.2 inch device, that's why the S24 and iPhone 15 Pro have them. However the 16 Pro is supposedly getting larger because it's getting a larger sensor for 5x optical zoom. If you look at a periscope lens, it needs a substantial amount of extra width as well. A teardown of any recent flagship reveals that camera modules occupy more space than they did if you look at tearsowns from three or four years back. This makes sense because the sensor itself is increasing in size and the size needs to go up both length and width wise to maintain the aspect ratio of the sensor. Heck in some cases like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and Oppo Find X7 Ultra, the camera modules occupy more space than the rest of the motherboard.

The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points.

The iPhone mini was cheaper but it had pretty much the same specs as the regular iPhone except for wireless charging speed iirc. Sales were much lower than the regular model despite that (around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales). If Apple couldn't make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.

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.

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.

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.

8+2 MP rubbish on a phone that's surely going to cost $600 or more at launch is honestly infuriating. This won't make sense in any market other than India.

Unfortunately both chips were fabbed by Samsung Foundry. Tensor is also fabbed by then which explains the overheating, poor efficiency and throttling. I really hope Samsung can catch up with TSMC with 3nm but would be wary of a Samsung fabbed SoC until they prove they've caught up. Qualcomm moved from Samsung to TSMC for the 8+ Gen 1 because Samsung weren't meeting their targets as they had low yield. The yield issue seems to be fixed according to some media outlets but doesn't seem like the fab itself has improved.