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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
...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.
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.
I will soon need to upgrade my old phone, and I'd just like a upgrade, they want to change everything:
Current one: 3.7" with slider qwerty keyboard and a 3-day removable battery. Fits in all my pockets, because it's thick, not tall.
Desired one: 4 to 4.5" 720p to 1080p with slider qwerty and a 3+ days battery. Maybe with wireless charging. Thickness under 2 cm, weight irrelevant.
Available stuff: thin massive flimsy with 1440p 5 to 6" and fingerprint reader designed to look cool when it pokes out of your pocket. Soft keyboards which speak twit, but not three languages at once.
I can't be the only person in the world who wants something that fits in my pocket and lets me type fast with tactile feedback.
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.
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!