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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I payed $160 USD for an octo core with 3 GB RAM and gorilla glass. It has dual sim but I haven't made much use of it yet. High end phones are cheap as long as you don't mind the delay as it ships from China.
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 !
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.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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"
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 $600+ for a phone without these basic features (besides an Apple customer)? It's a perfect opportunity for a cheap brand to build a customer base by having these features.
Guess i'm an idiot. I haven't ever wanted to put an SD card in my phone because I don't store anything significant on the phone... So far my phone is dying in ways that suggest the battery will outlast the rest of the phone ... I dunno, maybe the battery is replaceable but who cares?
Calling someone an idiot if they don't want the same things that you do is a bit arrogant, don't you think?
Depends... There have been preloaded malware incidents, but the bootloaders of these devices tend to be either not locked, or easily unlocked. After that, it isn't tough to flash a third party ROM, or good ol' CM.
Flashing a good ROM can go a long way into making a low end device quite useful, and for a flagship phone, making it worth the price premium.
All smartphones are cheap(the 1000$ 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.
What kind of idiot would pay Rich people maybe
There are also features like dual-SIM capability which seem to be more common on lower-end models.
Storage-wise, Android phones have languished, and iPhones slow to increase. One's best bet is just to get a low end phone that can handle SDXC and a 128 GB card for $85 or so. Plus, another advantage of a MicroSD card is that backups are easy to do. Fire up Titanium Backup or nandroid, dump /system, /data, and other volumes, pop the card and stash it away.
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.
If you spend more than $200 for a smartphone, you're not only an idiot, but a sucker as well.
Over the course of how long? Even if you buy your phone up front, this $200 budget won't keep your smartphone in service with major U.S. carriers for longer than about four or five months.
"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.
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.
How about $30 (or $16)... Tmobile prepaid ZTE Zinger, 1.3Ghz dualcore, bought new from Walmart, or the one I bought on eBay for $16..... Perfect for what wife and I need a phone for...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
...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.
So, I checked walmart.com which cites a resolution of 320 x 480 ... ouch. I think 4k in a tiny screen is silly (not in a really nice monitor, however), but 320x480 is painful for anything more than texting & phone calls. If that's all you need, I recommend a feature phone slider as it would have better battery life.
:)
It also says: 512MB RAM; 4GB ROM - 512MB means a lot of apps won't run well (especially multitasking). Again, not a problem if you don't need this, but then why focus so much on the (sic) 1.3Ghz dualcore (which Walmart says is a 1.2GHz dual-core processor)?
Not trolling, I'm a big fan of budget phones & used flagship phones (had the S2 for a long time, $50 used), but you seem awfully focused on a single feature.
btw, nice sig
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I dunno, maybe the battery is replaceable but who cares?
Safety reasons... Non removable batteries shouldn't even be legal.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
because you think 'the man' is listening to you argue with your wife while your phone is turned off?
Does everybody here go around making asinine assumptions? Read the very first two words of the damn post!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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!
Yeah, and that's why I picked up a Galaxy S4. So many people are avoiding the S6 and buying used S5s that the resale value on them is very high, so I got an S4 which seems good enough, and was only $130, though it doesn't have the S5's water resistance as I understand it.
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.
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.
If you remove the assumption that X is a basic feature, then maybe you will understand why people will by products without it.
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.
Well considering how many people are sticking to or buying Galaxy S5 phones and S6 sales are horrible, I'd say that maybe these features are more valued than you and Samsung would like to believe.
Samsung Silent on Disastrous S6 Sales
- "Has the reduced battery life and removal of expandable storage in the new models proved a bigger negative in customer eyes than was expected?"
Why Samsung Galaxy S6 sales suck
- "Samsung took things that S5 owners liked - features such as a removable battery and microSD card slot - and dumped them from the S6 design in order to make a smartphone that looked and felt more like the iPhone."
My phone does everything I want it to, it's five years old and is probably due a replacement battery since standby time is down to just shy of 100 hours.
(in case you don't want to click: it's an F930 that cost me £32.99 new on Three PAYG, it's still on Three and since they stopped doing all-you-can-eat data packages on PAYG last month, will probably get topped up by £10 a year now. The phone has an unspecified processor, quad band/HSPA (which means 3G@7Mbps yeah baby! Rare in 2010 for ANY phone), QVGA screen@167ppi (320x240, 2.4"), Bluetooth, MicroSDHC, standard headphone socket(!), standard MicroUSB charging/data/tether port (it will also tether over Bluetooth but 2MBit with lots of packet retransmission makes lag a pig to deal with) and that factory 1000mA battery which originally lasted a week and a half on standby).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
the S6 does have an amazing camera tho, my brother has one (he found it lying in the road, the lucky sod!)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I spend £10 a year.
If it weren't for the fact that occasionally I have to actually make a call or send a text, the only requirement for a carrier to maintain a number is that it receives a call once every six months. My GO phone hasn't been topped up in nine years, it's still got £48.85 credit on it out of the £50 I put on in 2006 and the SIM is still live because I give it a squirt charge every 4 weeks and dropcall it while it's doing that..
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
share it with the even redder NSA instead. Got it.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
A year or so ago, Samsung put out an ad campaign for the Galaxy S5 that called out major features, present in the S5, that were absent from the iPhone. The Galaxy had a larger screen, SD card slot, removable battery and it was water-proof. All features absent from the iPhone. And also now absent from the Galaxy S6. Definite step back, especially since Samsung has been completely ineffective at communicating what counter-veiling new features and benefits the new model has over its predecessor and/or the iPhone.
The S6 looks classier and more expensive than the S5. That's the only thing going for it. With the iPhone 6/6 Plus it no longer has a size advantage either. This is a problem, since for many buyers of the Galaxy S3/4/5, the screen size was the major driver tipping the purchase away from iPhone. The Android OS was either incidental, or even a drawback. Those customers are all jumping over to iPhone now that it has a big screen.
I have a pile of these ZTE Zingers in my house. The screen is, generally speaking, garbage. The 2MP, fixed-focus camera on the back is also a complete piece of crap. It at least runs KitKat, which is better optimized for devices with smaller installed memory. It's not a rocketship, but the UI is reasonably responsive. Of more serious concern is the fact that the 4GB ROM only yields about 1.25GB of free space, and the OS won't let you move apps onto the SD card. This limiation, ironically, serves to mitigate the multi-tasking issue, as it is simply not possible to install a large number of apps on the device..For my principal use case (kids playing Minecraft and watching Youtube) it is more than adequate, and represents phenomenal value, even at $30.
In terms of comparing it to iOS devices, I'd characterize it as comparable to the processor and battery of an iPhone 4S, combined with the display and camera from an iPhone 3G, and skimping with just a 4GB ROM.
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.
A Torx screwdriver isn't going to help you with a modern smartphone. The backs are *glued* on.
The other thing they can do is stick with the S5, or buy one. The resale values on the S5 right now are very high; I imagine high demand is keeping them that way.
Last Black Friday I picked up a couple LG (somethings) Net10 phones at Walgreens for my kids; $9.99+ tax, no service required, one of them was a 1.2ghz dual-core (rest of specs sucked, like the Zinger, but it was reasonably responsive). My kids (9 & 11) use them as MP3 players & for texting with Google Voice. These low-spec phones certainly have their uses, I just wouldn't want one as my main phone - for me, the point of a smart phone is I can do various tasks on them & a 4GB (which as you pointed out, has very little usable space) low-res device just doesn't accomplish that for me. My Galaxy S2 was plenty, though I was right place right time to get a nice (new to me) upgrade & caved to temptation :) (while I splurged, I only spent $50 - same I spent on the S2). I keep the S2 handy in case I lose/break my new phone, though, as it wouldn't really be a hardship to go back.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
...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.
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.
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.