the Samsung Galaxy S 9 plus only has 375
US dollars worth of materials in it but it launched at a retail price of
840 what and the iPhone 10 while
actually a little cheaper to assemble at three hundred and seventy dollars
retails to start at about a thousand
what if you could buy a phone for much
closer to its actual cost well it turns
out you can welcome back to another installment of why the five pertinent
friendly content are you guys buying this where today we've got one of the
top-selling phones on Chinese e-tailer gearbest the
213 dollar you me digi s to not to be
confused with the Samsung Galaxy s2 also
today is this exciting opportunity to learn about madrenas coffee madrenas
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the unis did G or me did G yeah let's go
with them s to has hundreds of reviews awarding it four point seven eight out
of five stars on average and you can order one of these puppies for just two
hundred and twenty nap okay actually it depends what warehouse you order it from
because gearbest is super weird but let's call it two hundred and thirteen
dollars now based on the language of the
bulk of the reviews the s2 has been a bigger hit in Russia Poland and Italy
than it has in the fancy-ass US and day
but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get ridiculed by your flagship
fondling friends because the s2 doesn't look like a budget phone it has a six
inch edge to edge display in the chic 18
by 9 aspect ratio and anodized aluminum chassis with a USB type-c port and it's
got a dual lens for your camera right above the rear fingerprint reader and
the internals aren't terrible either unlike some value smartphones it's got
64 gigs of storage and it's expandable
via microSD in the dual SIM slot it has
the same amount of RAM as the Google pixel - and it has nearly double the
rated battery capacity of the iPhone 10 50 100 milliamp hours so in practice
getting it to two days is a pretty easy feat now compare that to what budget
phones were like just a few years ago the Samsung Galaxy s5 and the motorola
moto e both launched in 2014 with a
similar price differential to what we're looking at here except that the Moto e
was 50% thicker than the galaxy s5 had
half the RAM and didn't have a front camera at all
so how then have companies like Umi digi
which was only founded in 2012 managed
to close the gap so much well there are
three main reasons first the small
brands avoid some of the expenses that eventually ricky'll down into the price
of premier brand phones so they use off-the-shelf components instead of
researching and developing their own cutting-edge tech they focus on online
and guerilla style marketing instead of
doing things like spending fifteen million dollars on a single Superbowl
commercial they rely on established ecommerce platforms like gearbest and
Amazon instead of trying to build out their own stores and they benefit from
what's called the economies of agglomeration
what that means is that since everything
is made in and around Shenzhen China they have easy access to manufacturing
talent and inexpensive labor without having to invest much in their own
logistics the second way that Chinese companies keep the price down is by
flat-out paying less for their components and now I'm not even
necessarily talking about using older inferior technology I'm talking about
using the exact same parts that could be
in your Samsung or your Apple phone but
for less money so how do they get a deal like that the answer is binning a big
brand with a reputation to uphold will by the suppliers best parts they're a
parts batches of thousands of units where maybe only 1% of them are likely
to fail that manufacturer's quality checks but as for value brands like this
one they'll buy batches with significantly higher failure rates and
much lower price tags to match strategy number three for keeping the
cost down is to just not make any profit on the device now Umi digi doesn't do
this but Xiaomi famously sells their
phones with zero profit margin in exchange for market share and brand
recognition paying the bills ostensibly by selling accessories like head phones
power banks luggage and really the
slippers okay so does all of this mean then that soon
there will be no reason whatsoever to
buy a flagship from Google Apple or Samsung the answer is No
no it doesn't because budget phones still have a lot of cut corners the s2
screen for example looks like it was just glued on to the front of a phone
instead of being seamlessly integrated into the camp furred edges though in
fairness once you put it into the included sandstone case that particular
flaw melts away with that said there's no hiding the
resolution the s2 has about the same
number of pixels as the iPhone 6 from 2014 but they're spread over a larger
area giving it about half the pixel density of the leading phones its size
and this is noticeable when you're reading text and in particular in the
way that Netflix seems to handle streaming content to this phone it looks
noticeably worse than even other value devices and
then there's the camera while it isn't a
complete potato patch the dual lens
business is basically a complete marketing gimmick
because the bokeh mode doesn't do I mean
it just doesn't work like at all it just kind of makes everything but the center
of the frame blurry it's it's just stupid like look at this it's just it's
just it's like rubbing Vaseline on every part of the lens that isn't the very
center here nobody takes pictures like that I mean never mind not having a I
assisted you know bokeh background removal there's no there's no I even
there's no consideration of depth at all it's a total joke and then finally
there's the support or lack thereof I
was having issues with my pixel to excel and Google quickly effortlessly dealt
with the RMA for me even offering advanced replacement I
would be floored to hear a similar story
about umi digi and as for software this
thing is running Android marshmallow which launched in 2015 and it will
probably run marshmallow forever but might not seem like a huge deal on the
surface but Android didn't even have a built-in slight utility at that point
and it's got Google now on tap instead
of the assistant which you can't get unless you do this one weird trick that
phone manufacturers hate so is it time
for you to stop spending your life savings every time you need a new phone
the you me two gs two is a mere stock if
a little dated Android experience with almost no bloat and it's not even that
slow so if you don't care much about the camera and some people don't I say it's
time for us to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves do I really
need the latest and greatest need is a strong word but the speakers
are awful fast charging is a super nice thing to have and that oh man that
Netflix experience I don't remember the last time I saw a
movie look this bad and I like Marvel movies
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gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked
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button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video
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