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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.'"
The swappable battery isn't just for people who burn through their battery in a day and need to swap it. It's also for people whose battery goes bad and they'd like to replace it. With a non-removeable battery, you either need a new phone or have to pay $$$ to have it swapped professionally. With a swappable battery, no problem, just buy a replacement somewhere and pop it in. There's no really good reason not to have it; the Galaxy S5 even manages to be waterproof with a swappable battery.
Would you buy a car where the tires couldn't be changed? It's not like you have to do it often, and some tires can go nearly 100k miles now.