We Love Cheap Phones

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 575 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Used to be that if you wanted a new phone, you had to choose between something cheap and something good. But a recent slate of smartphones like the new Google Pixel 4A and the Apple iPhone SE offer an appealing compromise: Most of the features and processing power of a $1,000 phone for somewhere around $400. These devices come with some tradeoffs, of course. The cameras aren't quite as fast, and the screen might not be buttery smooth or blisteringly bright. But the growing market for budget phones shows that premium features aren’t everything, especially at a time when people are less and less likely to splurge on fancy gadgets.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu joins us to talk about the Pixel 4A possibilities and limitations of cheap phones.

Show Notes:

Read Julian’s review of the Pixel 4A here. Read Adrienne So’s story about the duffel bag from The Expanse here.

Recommendations:

Julian recommends the Herman Miller Embody chair (but don’t pay full price for it). Mike recommends the sci-fi show The Expanse. Lauren recommends Nice White Parents, a new podcast from NYT and Serial.

Julian Chokkattu can be found on Twitter @JulianChokkattu. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Mike.
0:00.9	Hey, Lauren.
0:01.8	Mike, how much did you spend on the last phone that you bought?
0:05.4	Oh, God, I can't even remember.
0:08.0	The last phone that I bought with my own money, it was probably the pixel two that I got for my wife.
0:15.9	And so that was probably what, several hundred dollars at the time?
0:19.2	Yeah, it was like 600 bucks or something would you spend that
0:22.3	again uh no why not cheap phones are awesome now well they are and that's actually what we're going
0:30.5	to talk about this week on gadget lab hi everyone welcome to gadget lab hi everyone welcome to gadget Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good, a senior writer at Wired, and I'm joined remotely by my co-host, Wired Senior Editor Michael Colori.
0:49.6	Hello, hello. Hello, hello. And we are also joined by Wired Senior Associate Editor Julian Chukatu.
0:56.0	Hey, Julian. Hello. Welcome back to the show. It's great to have you back. Thanks for having me.
1:01.3	So earlier this week, Google launched its latest pixel smartphone, the Pixel 4A. The 4A is the budget model in Google's lineup with a base price of just $350.
1:13.4	That's less than half the price of the top iPhone models, the Samsung Galaxy S20,
1:19.3	and it's even about half the price of Google's other pixel phone.
1:23.1	And yet this so-called budget phone still has a lot of the things most people want in a smartphone,
1:28.9	right? It has a really nice screen, a good camera, a fingerprint sensor, a headphone jack.
1:35.3	So what we're really seeing happen here is this rise of the mid-range smartphone, because
1:40.4	the pixel 4A isn't alone. Back in April, Apple launched the iPhone SE for just $399.
1:48.0	Samsung sells the Galaxy A51 for around $400. Last week, One Plus showed off a new phone that you can get for just over $400.
1:57.0	And considering the way the economy is going, fewer people, frankly, are going to want to spend
2:02.3	much more than that. So Julian, we brought you on because you wrote the wired review of the Google
2:08.5	Pixel 4A this week, and you've been testing it for a while. Tell us what kind of phone people
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WIRED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WIRED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.