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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.'"
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.
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.
Really? I think it works great. Android feels like junk in comparison.
love is just extroverted narcissism
There can only one manufacturer with overpriced, over-hyped, over-marketed smartphones with a simple name even a toddler could remember. All the rest just don't have what it takes to cheat millions out of paying 30-60% more for poorly-designed crap.
They might, but not for long.
The problem with Android is that manufacturers are basically franchisees of a Google product. They are allowed to put in better or worse processors and screens and batteries and cameras but that doesn't differentiate their brand; any competitor can do the same. As such, Android phones are a commodity: the moment a manufacturer tries to turn a profit, a new competitor comes in with no margins and cuts their legs out from under them.
Samsung did the best job of anyone trying to differentiate their phones, and as such was the only profitable Android manufacturer for several years. But even they are losing market share rapidly to the likes of Xiaomi and Huawei and their profits have fallen off a cliff in the past couple years.
So... could Xiaomi take over the Android market? Sure, as long as they're willing to lose more money than everyone else. Could they topple Apple? Not likely. If people are willing to pay for a $650 iPhone over a $150 Android, they'll likely pay for a $650 iPhone over a $100 or $50 Android. Apple has the luxury of differentiating itself as a product and reaps the benefits.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with Android as a platform. I own Android devices, I enjoy many things about them (and my list of dislikes shrinks each year), and I think it's wonderful a relatively open platform has seen such widespread adoption. So far, Android manufacturers' loss has been Android users' gain, but if those losses continue I fear Android may follow the PC industry's race to the bottom: Many manufacturers could abandon the platform while those remaining steadily cut quality and pursue 'alternate revenue streams' like trials and ads and other paid placement. I hope I'm wrong, though.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Maybe because some money is better than no money. Foreign companies likely don't think the way US companies do: these days in the US, if a large company can't be #1 or #2, with an insanely-huge profit margin, they just throw in the towel and go chase after something else (usually failing, whereas they would have made a lot more money just sticking in there and making lower profits as #3, #4, or #5). In other countries, they don't always have this mentality. What's wrong with being #5 and making a small profit while your employees have good jobs and your executives have handsome salaries? Maybe the shareholders won't like it as much, but who cares; if you're a large enough company, you shouldn't need outside investment anyway.
Also, these other companies could be taking the long-term view: it's better for them to hang around and outlast the others, and wait for them to make a misstep, or for people to get sick of their high prices.
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 and a removable battery. What kind of idiot would pay $600+ for a phone without these basic features (besides an Apple customer)? It's a perfect opportunity for a cheap brand to build a customer base by having these features.
I used a 635 for a week; now my daughter uses it. I actually thought that the Windows Phone OS part was pretty nice, at least as good as iOS or Android. And the phone itself was pretty nice too, if the camera had a flash I would have no problem with the hardware really. The problem was that there were a number of apps that I was used to on Android which were not available. That's the Achilles heel of that phone.
Bloated price tag, or baked in bloatware/malware. Which is worse?
I mostly loathe my Samsung POS Android phone due to the small internal memory that is larded up with crap I can't delete, but can't stomach an iphone price tag. My wife loves her 5s, and it is a much better widget that works far better and has held up better as well. She upgraded from a different Android POS that auto-updated itself until it ran out of memory and there was no easy way to clear it out and make it a usable phone again.
So in looking for a new phone for me it is either a minefield of Android crap phones, or a pretty solid overpriced iphone. At least with a $60 phone you can readily toss it if it turns out to suck too badly.
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.