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The Realities of a $50 Smartphone
An anonymous reader writes: Google recently reiterated their commitment to the goal of a $50 smartphone in India, and a new article breaks down exactly what that means for the phone's hardware. A budget display will eat up about about $8 of that budget — it's actually somewhat amazing that so little money can still buy a 4-4.5" panel running at 854x480. For another $10, you can get a cheap SoC — something in the range of 1.3Ghz and quad-core, complete with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS radios. A gigabyte of RAM and 4 gigabytes of storage can be had for another $10 or so. Throw in a $2.10, 1,600 mAh battery and a $5 camera unit, and you've got most of a phone. That leaves about $9 to play with for basic stuff like a casing, and then packaging/marketing costs (some of which could be given freely, like the design work.) Profit margins will be nonexistent, but that's less of an issue for Google, who simply wants to spread the reach of Android.
While making affordable tech for poor countries is nice, as is getting as many people on line. Why do we push this so much? To the point were people want to consider broadband a human right?
The printing press came out, no one said everyone deserves to get their stuff in print. The car came out: it wasn't ever considered a human right. Dido phone, refrigerator, power, running water etc. Poor people have many more problems to deal with before Twitter and Facebook reach the point of being the "next injustice" to fix. Some of those problems can be helped with computer tech for sure. But internet access to the home is way, way down on the list.
Don't talk to me like I don't understand. My point was that I don't think it's smart business, not that I didn't understand the business model.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire