Why do people buy brand phones?

I like gadgets. A lot.

I consider phones to be gadgets, not just phones, because they are. I don’t like any one company over the other and I like to try new things.

I don’t like to spend money on gadgets. They lose value fast and I always find something more useful to spend my money on.

I never went over the 250 euro/phone limit and this post is about phones in that price range.

Last year I bought the Huawei P9 Lite 2017 and it was around 150 euros. Something similar from Samsung was around 250 euros. But people still buy more Samsung phones.

Why?

Why would I pay 66% more on something that has the same specs or worse, but has a more renowned brand name?

Let me tell you what happened to me.

I bought a second hand LG Nexus 5X. Spec wise, the Huawei has the winning spot for the RAM and CPU and it means that it should go more smoothly through apps … right?

Wrong.

Huawei doesn’t do two things right:

  1. It doesn’t clean the extra data remaining from updating or uninstalling an app. I tried this with a clean reset install/login in apps  and saw some serious space differences.
  2. It doesn’t manage the RAM properly. After a week of using it, my phone would become sluggish and would behave like a Windows ME on a Pentium 1.

I didn’t saw these two issue reproducing on the Nexus or Samsung devices.

My next phone will be a Xiaomi. Let’s see if, in the same price range, it will do a better job.