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Cheap Smartphones Quietly Becoming Popular In the US
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that ZTE and its cheap Android smartphones have been grabbing more and more of the market in the U.S. It's not that the phones are particularly good — it's that they're "good enough" for the $60 price tag. The company has moved up to fourth among smartphone makers, behind Apple, Samsung and LG. That puts them ahead of a lot of companies making premium devices: HTC, Motorola, and BlackBerry, to name a few. ZTE, a Chinese manufacturer, seems to be better at playing the U.S. markets than competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei, and they're getting access to big carriers and big retailers. "Its phone sales are all the more surprising because it's been frozen out of the more lucrative telecom networking market since 2012. That year, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report warning that China's intelligence services could potentially use ZTE's equipment, and those of rival Huawei Technologies, for spying. Huawei then dismissed the allegations as 'little more than an exercise in China bashing.'"
35$ on amazon it is a great phone
love is just extroverted narcissism
This year work implemented the "use your phone for business and we'll give you $50 a month" plan. We turn in our existing company supplied phone and install their apps on our personal phone.
Sounds to me like getting this one will keep the megacorp off of my personal phone and they can deal with whatever garbage is running on it.
(Technically I'll probably just add a second phone to my existing contract and be done with it. No Android phones though. I've had one for the past few years and I just don't like it.)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I've purchased several of their entertainment and networking products before, they are of extremely high quality and aesthetically pleasing as well, at ridiculously low prices. If they step up their marketing presence in the west they could easily dominate. I'm sure that would be met by legal opposition from Apple, Samsung, etc. though, who knows how they would fare against that.
Twinstiq, game news
My smartphone is five years old (HTC Droid Incredible, considered the best phone on the market at the time I bought it). Even though it only supports 3G and will never be updated beyond Android 2.3.4, it still browses the internet at acceptable speeds with a modern browser (Firefox). Smartphones have been at "good enough" for quite some time now.
...there are some other interesting things you can do with your inexpensive smartphone. I have a couple of these:
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
For use in development with this:
http://www.rangenetworks.com/p...
And it may enable SCADA and text message coverage of farms and places that will never get commercial GSM coverage at an incredible pricepoint.
The article does mention, toward the end, the common problem all of these low-cost handset makers have: ZTE has expanded its US marketshare by 50%, but only seen its revenue increase by 4%.
Apple is making plenty of money on smartphones. Samsung is making some money on smartphones. Everyone else is either barely scraping by, or losing money on the category.
Really makes you wonder why they do it sometimes...and why none of the other smartphone makers even seem to be trying to crack the actually-making-money part of the market.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Has phones with Qualcomm processors in them for under 100 dollars.
With 1 gig of RAM. And Adreno 3xx series GPUs (Maybe 4xx series now.) Plus 5+ megapixel cameras, Gorilla Glass and side loaded SD cards.
Put simply: Compared to some of the 200+ dollar phones, other than screen resolution, nfc, s-pen (or equivalents), and lack of a front camera, they are actually better in most of the ways that count. And at 100 bucks you don't have to worry about smashing them up or dropping them in a toilet unless you don't keep backups of your onboard data.
Any proof of that? My 100 dollar Foxconn phone was as plain vanilla Android as you can get them. Even the apps my telco added could be removed easily without rooting. Quite a breath of fresh air after the iPhone that made me feel dumb and handicapped. Go figure.
Oh yes, I'm living in that "other" China: Taiwan!
Can you program these things without having to rely on some shady hack's proprietary jailbreak program?
I don't care what it does, or how much you make. If you spend more than $200 for a smartphone, you're not only an idiot, but a sucker as well.
So, being on a budget, and buying phones for the whole family (wife + 2 teenage kids), a couple of years ago I got us all new phones. The wife and kids needed the closest thing to a status symbol we could afford, so they got Samsung S3's; I don't care and saved like $100 getting the ZTE 9810. My screen is bigger, the battery lasts longer, and everything works fine on it. The only difference was memory (8GB vs 16), which is a problem because I hardly have anything installed and run out of memory really easily (external card helps, but doesn't fix the problem). But on the whole I like my phone just as much as they like their's because I don't care about brand names.
The S3's all have charging problems, too. The mini USB connectors just have a problem making a good connection.
I had to replace one recently - despite plans to get everyone new phones this Christmas, so I opted for one of the cheapest I could get. My wife, the biggest complainer in the bunch, got a $50 phone as a temporary replacement, and isn't complaining.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
much easier to chuck a burner phone in the dumpster when it's only $35.
You get what you pay for......the GPS is lousy, for example.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Honestly I've got a "cheaper" phone myself and haven't had any issues. I've got a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime - originally designed for the Indian market but then released over here. I have to buy my phones unsubsidized to keep my unlimited data plan, so for $175 outright/no contract this worked out well.
Compared to most "premium" phones the specs on this one are terrible, but aside from on-paper I have no issues with it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I dont use facebook, instagram, twitter, or other social networks so a smartphone is mostly quick access to the internet, text messages and google maps. the phone part is a ubiquitous inconvenience that languishes from voicemail to voicemail in a perpetual stage of sixty-something missed calls from recruiters and that boat horn that tries to sell me a cruise package in the bahamas. the battery is guaranteed to be shit after about a year and a half, and in some of the sexiest and priciest phones it can never be replaced. I can hack a cheapo phone easier than the brand new iDevice, and if i brick it well its cheap.
i spend 16 eye bleeding hours a day on the internet or in front of a computer. ive been a sysadmin for so long i no longer care about the cool-factor for phones or tablets, or e-readers or any of that stuff. Most of the top-of-the-line models turn into craigslist fodder or suffer early adopter syndromes of varying degrees that spirit them off to the landfill. each new iteration of a sex symbol phone is a new chance to adopt a new charging standard, whereas cheapo phones are usually some ubiquitous USB standard i have in a box of cables somewhere.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's alive and well here in the UK, if my neighbors and coworkers are any example.
and was deprecated a short time later by mozilla so i could not continue FFOS development. Well, too bad for Mozilla, putting off their supporters this way.
Years ago, I got a used iPhone 3GS and a cheap AT&T GoPhone. Took the SIM card from GoPhone and put it in the iPhone. It worked instantly, no jailbreaking or funny business required aside from an APN change which took seconds. At the time, GoPhones were being marketed towards poor people, old people and drug dealers as far as I can tell. All I knew was that I had a reasonably new phone (the 4 had just come out), I had no contract and my monthly bill was around $20. Compare that to people who were shelling out close to $100 to AT&T for the iPhone contract. Even in my highest months of data usage, I never cracked $30. That's saving something approaching $1K/year. I have wifi at home and wifi at work so data only got really used on my commute, and that was pretty much Waze doing whatever magic it does to find traffic jams. Music and podcasts were always synced on wifi.
AT&T then figured out a lot of people were doing this and jacked up the price to $50/month. Screw that. I bought a Galaxy S4 and went to Ting. Bill is back to $25/month, phone keeps working fine. I don't feel a tremendous urge to get a S5, S6 or whatever the $new_shiny is because what this one does is perfectly adequate.
My kid is becoming of an age where it would be advantageous for her to have a phone. No way in hell is she getting some top of the line model, and no way in hell am I getting a contract for her to have a phone. If the handset is $60 and it works on Ting, I'll add that right on and set up the account so she can communicate with certain people, but at $60 when it gets inadvertently stepped on or dropped, I'm not going to care all that much.
Got a ZTE Grand Max X. After bout 8 months its been great. In terms of performance its seems alot like an S3 to me.
ZTE Maven
Pros
Quad core processor
Fast mobile data support (4G)
Cons
Low pixel density screen (218 ppi)
Too little RAM memory (1024 MB RAM)
Battery is not user replaceable
Low-resolution camera (5 megapixels)
The camera lacks autofocus
GSM phone, works only on AT&T and T-Mobile. Other countries are mostly GSM.
Battery is not user replaceable: Throw away the phone if the battery is defective or at end of life? I would not buy a phone that won't allow a new battery.
If it is possible to carry extra batteries, fully charged, there are circumstances where that is convenient. For example, when hitchhiking through Europe, and staying a week or two in a city, it is possible to get a local SIM so that people you meet have a local number they can call.
Lets look at the typical BOM cost for a phone.
CPU: Quad core - next to nothing in terms of cost, say $10
Radio: Quad Band GSM - Say $20, on the high side, combined with GPS and WiFi
Screen: Typical 3.5" to 7" Screen, no more than $15-$30
Battery: $10
Misc Circuitry : $10
OS: Free
Apps: Free
Malware: Free
Crapware: Free
So for a typical $600 Phone, there is about $400-$500 in profit, even if we count assembly, by the slave labor.
Then again, I need my phone to make and receive calls. Most "phones" these days are terrible at that core function. But they can:
-Take crappy pictures
-Record crappy audio
-Play crappy games
-Steal my data
-Run third rate GPS software, using free third rate maps, and free reports from other idiots running said software
The phone manufacturers are too busy copying each other's phablets, and the consumer demand for a small, thick QUALITY phone is ignored.
There are other form factors than 5" enormophone slabs - see the Palm Pre, for example - so MAKE SOMETHING DIFFERENT !
that strategy got you a smartphone without paying for the privilege of poking at your phone's screen -- i.e. the ridiculous mandatory smartphone data charges.. (or paying 'fully' for the device for that matter)
the day that a carrier figures out that people want smartphones without data plans (i.e. wifi only) is the day retail sales of smartphones goes through the roof
until then, for us, it's $50 retail-price replacements as needed (no 2 year contract stretch) for our "feature phones" and staying on our grandfathered 'local' calling plan from two acquisitions ago that is $50+.mo cheaper (for 3 lines) than we can get now from any carrier with sufficient voice coverage here.
I bought a Motorola Flipout in early 2011 for about $200. I'm still using it. Ok, it's Android 2.1 and I don't have many new apps running on it (but the recent google photos works fine !)
But that's not a surprise that they're slowly gaining market share : most media only talk about iPhones and similar Samsung devices, because that's what carriers and retailers only want to show (and usually hide real prices behind a monthly plan).
Cheap smartphones have literally boomed here in France since in 2012 a new carrier (Free) decided to offer very low cost plans with no phone, showing people that they were actually paying their $600 smartphone at least twice with their monthly plan with hidden costs.
It's the new buzzword. Does my head in. Might as well say "We didn't spot this as news until now"
Depends... There have been preloaded malware incidents, but the bootloaders of these devices tend to be either not locked, or easily unlocked. After that, it isn't tough to flash a third party ROM, or good ol' CM.
Flashing a good ROM can go a long way into making a low end device quite useful, and for a flagship phone, making it worth the price premium.
>
the day that a carrier figures out that people want smartphones without data plans (i.e. wifi only) is the day retail sales of smartphones goes through the roof
until then, for us, it's $50 retail-price replacements as needed (no 2 year contract stretch) for our "feature phones" and staying on our grandfathered 'local' calling plan from two acquisitions ago that is $50+.mo cheaper (for 3 lines) than we can get now from any carrier with sufficient voice coverage here.
I have a 2013 Moto X which I bought new last year for $200, with a Cricket SIM. I pay $35 a month for unlimited talk and text, 2.5GB fast data, and unlimited slow data after that (I rarely even hit 1GB). Plus since I switched from T-Mobile they gave me $100 bill credit. Cricket uses AT&T's towers, which around me is fine; they don't have the roaming of full AT&T but that's fine with me. It think that it's a reasonable price.
They also gave me a Nokia 635 when I switched, which I unlocked after 4 months or so and gave to my teenage daughter. I got her an H2O SIM and turned off mobile data on it; with her usage it costs about $10/month or less. Unlocked prepaid FTW.
All smartphones are cheap(the 1000$ smartphones cost less than a couple of hundreds to make), the problem is the price that the consumer has to pay.
Head over to eBay and you can get an iPhone 4 for $45.
I mostly loathe my Samsung POS Android phone due to the small internal memory that is larded up with crap I can't delete
Android 5 "Lollipop" introduced a mechanism to let the manufacturer preload apps into the user partition. A factory reset erases them, but when the user connects to Wi-Fi for the first time after a reset, the phone restores the preloaded apps from the Google Play Store server. At least this way, the user can delete the apps from the user partition instead of having the factory version sit in the system partition even after the user has uninstalled updates. I wouldn't be surprised if use of this mechanism became mandatory for OHA members as of Android 6 "Marshmallow".
Don't forget, the top phone brands are all busy neutering their phones by removing all the most useful features, such as an SD card slot
The SD Card Association already did that, by requiring SD licensees to license Microsoft's exFAT patent or not be able to use cards bigger than 32 GB.
Only devices meeting the CDD (Android's compatibility definition) are eligible to include Google Play Store. One of the CDD requirements is that the user be able to adb install homemade APKs.
So it wouldn't surprise me if it was true that they were using those devices for spying.
"We install the backdoors and trojans on the factory floor ourselves, and pass the savings on to you!!"
On the other hand, why pay for stuff you don't need?
Because the carrier requires you to. For a long time, carriers would not activate low-minute pay-as-you-go plans with no data on smartphones. Only dumbphones were eligible for plans with no data. Instead, carriers required customers to have high-minute or unmetered plans including data, even if the subscriber already has a landline at home and plans to be near Wi-Fi whenever doing anything requiring an Internet connection. For example, Sprint's Virgin Mobile wouldn't activate a payLo plan on an Android phone, and AT&T has been known to cram a data plan onto a subscriber's bill unless the subscriber performed some obscure trickery involving buying a SIM online and activating it through the Internet before putting it in the phone.
Or because manufacturers have required you to. There hasn't been a serious Android-powered challenger to the iPod touch, a Wi-Fi-only tablet in the 4 to 5 inch range. The Archos 43 never caught on because of its resistive touch screen (though it worked well with a stylus) and lack of Google Play Store. Samsung tried with the Galaxy Player, but it didn't catch on either, possibly in part because it was stuck on Android 2 and because I never saw them in stores. So people who never plan to connect to a cellular network end up paying for a cellular radio that they don't use.
If they tell me Company X is spying, my reaction is to shrug and think, "They're all spying. Company X simply got caught".
They still haven't caught my submarine though.
On the open seas,
in the dark of night,
hidden from their feeble sight
Glassy water
sobbing daughter
on their dank and misty shore
Through my scope
A ghastly scene
Their fragile junk
It has been sunk
by a Confederate submarine!
Spying? I shrug.
BOOM! Glug, glug, glug.
Pre-'smartphone' the US market was dominated by whatever cheap crap the carriers could get stamped out for them at lowest possible cost, typically with their specially en-worsened firmware flashed onto it. They wanted something that could be sold as 'free with contract' at lowest possible cost, and there just wasn't much incentive to attempt to use handsets as a differentiatior because all the carriers had access to basically the same OEMs, and consumer expectations were low.
Once smartphones hit, with Apple's AT&T exclusive showing the value of a proper 'flagship' device, and the prospect of getting a customer onto a data plan being very, very, compelling; the enthusiasm of carriers for dumbphones dropped substantially; but they still had exactly the same 'we need an endurable handset as cheap as possible for customers who don't otherwise care' incentive. Since they really want you to walk out with a data plan, they've shifted focus to the low-end Androids and iPhone 5c(if the customer insists), rather than the developing-world-special $20 phones; but they still want to pay as little as possible for those basic shelf-stuffer phones.
Plus, as with computers, the usability of the cheap seats has gotten surprisingly adequate. Still not as good as the ones that cost 2-6 times as much; but it is certainly no longer the case than anything under $200 refutes a loving god if you try to use it.
Reading past the FUD, the hardware they're talking about is practically the same hardware you'd find in a premium phone: screen, processor, memory and whatever else by SAMSUNG, probably fabricated in Taiwan and assembled in Korea. In fact, a lot of what you'll find in a ZTE F930 is IDENTICAL to the hardware you'll find in a Samsung Galaxy Y (a Mini-3) (source: had both apart while swapping parts to get one good phone!). So while they're panicking over ZTE, they're sending messages on fucking iPhones! Identical bar the price tag and the badge!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They have the numbers, they have millions individually in disposable income, and they don't need your stinking apps that younger more gullible cell users get taken in by.
Adapt. Because the wave is coming, and it cares nothing for your workplace-driven chrome sensibilities. It's all about Tiny Houses, solar/wind off the grid, doing fun things, and not paying The Man for stuff you don't want and don't need.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They blew it a year or two back when Apple announced their new chip had 64 bits, QC was sitting there with only 32 and 64 not on the drawing board. Then they botched their first 64 bit chip, now Apple/Samsung have taken the high end smartphone market. Neither uses a QC chip anymore.
/QC employee '96-'08
// Friends still there tell me it hasn't been fun there for 3-4 years now
/// Best job I ever had. sigh
On the other end, QC just isn't organized to make cheap chips. They have too much management, too much bloat, too many side products that don't pan out (Digital Cinema, MediaFlo, Mirasol, etc).
What's really sad is upper management, starting with Paul Jacobs I suspect, drove the company into the ground. Now they're laying off 15% of their workforce (minimum, speculation is there will be another wave or two after this month's layoff), while Paul and Steve are raking in 8 figure salaries and bonuses.
...Cheap implies poorly made or inferior to the job.
The fact is the technology has gotten so good that people can get a smart phone that does everything they want for 100 dollars.
Now does that mean the 500 dollar smartphone doesn't do more... it does do more. But how much of that "more" is something most people care about?
So yeah. This is what is going on with PCs. People are buying 300 dollar PCs Why? They work just fine for purpose.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The downside of Android 5 is that updates are done at the block level, rather than the file level, so any modification of /system pretty much makes OTA updates impossible.
Add to this stuff like Samsung's Knox which actually physically destroys parts of the device... I'll just stick with iOS, which doesn't have app bloat.
I've been using a Huawei Ascend Mate2 for almost 18 months. NOT ONE problem. Very little junk added, easy to remove. $300 got me a 6.1" screen, snapdragon 400, 720p screen, 2gb ram, 4,000mAH battery,ext SD card, JB4.3 Laugh all you want at the specs....IF FLIPPIN' FLIES! Most stable smartphone I've ever had. Just updated at the end of June to LL 5.1.1, they skipped KK4.x It goes 3-4 weeks easy without having to reboot to make it "snappy" again, with heavy use, 2-3 days on one battery charge without having to use silly battery "savers". Photos through the 13mp camera are EXCELLENT. Signal (straight talk at&t towers) is as good as any of my previous phones. The size puts some off, but I love the screen. (dell streak 5>galaxy note1>Mate2). This phone turned me off of the locked down, feature stripped, carrier bloated, over priced "flagships" for good!
2015, the year of Windows on the phonetop.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Instead of going with a designed-cheap phone, better to go with a last-generation model - as it will suffer less from corner-cutting.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You all modded me flamebait, and not 12 hours later...here's the next story!
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
BYOD, whatever you like as long as it has dual SIM. Load whatever crapware work foist upon you via a "xen for phones" virtualized image that auto-self-destructs remotely if the device is stolen or you leave the company.
I'm shocked we can put a man on the moon but it's late 2015 and this still isn't a widespread thing.
Thanks, but I don't want to share my life with the Red Chinese.
I'll just stick with iOS, which doesn't have app bloat.
And which doesn't have several categories of apps at all. If you find yourself needing an app in one of those categories, you'll end up right back on Android.
...People are waking up and realizing they don't need to buy the most hyped and expensive brand...
But that's almost like saying Capitalism doesn't matter or that Advertising doesn't work. Oh the humanity.
I got my straight talk LG L34C Android phone, running android 4.4 (KItKat), for $29. From Walmart, who you may have heard of before.
Really good phone, and the only app found so far that I haven't been able to run is Angry Birds 2. And who cares? There are 45 Angry Birds sequels, how did this one get called number 2? I can think of one reason but I digress.
My point is nobody is, like, pointing and laughing at my slightly-smaller-yet-vivid-and-bright-screen. Either that or I'm too busy playing Angry Birds Pop to notice.
The $45 per month pay-in-advance unlimited everything is something I'm not entirely thrilled about mostly because I'm poor (hurry up, Google Fi!), but there you go.
Really good smartphone for $29 and I'm not running around with a cracked-screen iPhone like everyone I see around town but the phones are too expensive to replace, so they all have cracked screens and bleeding fingers. Haha, you have a cracked screen on your expensive iPhone! And your fingers are bleeding! See how that works?
Depends... There have been preloaded malware incidents, but the bootloaders of these devices tend to be either not locked, or easily unlocked. After that, it isn't tough to flash a third party ROM, or good ol' CM.
Flashing a good ROM can go a long way into making a low end device quite useful, and for a flagship phone, making it worth the price premium.
will never buy cheap phones or take them if given as a freebie, you get what you pay for! Nothing really is free, you pay one way or another.
Every phone is made in China, including the iPhone. Anyway If anyone is going to be bugging calls etc it will be the USA & the NSA.