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Google CEO Says Next Wave Of Affordable Smartphones Should Cost $30 (phandroid.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google started the Android One program to get affordable smartphones into all corners of the globe. Those devices cost around $100, which is very good for an up-to-date device. However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai doesn't think $100 is good enough. Even $50 is too much. His goal is $30. "The right price point for smartphones in India is $30, and pursuing high-quality smartphones at the price point will unlock it even more." ndia currently has the largest base of Android users, and most of those users have phones that cost less than $150. Pichai went on to say that cheaper devices are only part of the solution. They also need services that can run reliably on "flaky" networks. He says Google is working on making more services adapt to slow internet.
They can get theirs even cheaper.
Many astute citizens have already noticed the recent censorship of media pieces critical toward Google. Don't fool yourself: this is definitely part of a master plan, and Slashdot are probably the ones behind it.
Wall Street has all but confirmed that they have rigged the markets according to instructions from Google, which has been under secret leadership by Brad Pitt for over 2 years now.
Numerous pop songs from the 90s make veiled references to this.
In 1851, Civil War general Robert E. Lee reported a strange disturbance in the sky over the Potomac. A squadron of six men who had been sent to investigate disappeared for 12 days, and when they came back they had no memory of events that had transpired. Lee wrote in his diary, âoeOur inspection of the men turned up nothing, but their forearms were branded with a curious unknown symbol: 'Google'.â
A prominent news anchor, who asked to remain anonymous, discovered he was being covertly photographed after he uncovered this issue.
When asked, executives from Google have been unable to explain why employees at their headquarters keep altering the Wikipedia page for WW2.
You won't see THIS on your evening news.
This coming from the company that taking away their affordable mid-ranged phones and has only released an expensive high end phone. Google needs to lead... not order.
No good deed goes unpunished.
You don't charge what it costs, you charge what they are willing to pay for..
did you forget to take your meds?
Before they do anything else to expand the pool of vulnerable phones is to eliminate any excuses carriers and vendors have for not providing security patches.
He says Google is working on making more services adapt to slow internet.
Ad-free solves 90%+ of the bandwidth problem for many uses. And killing off the financial viability of youtube and facebook is a great idea. I'd be happy to pay $10 a month for 1 gig of ad-free, graphics-free, css and javascript free internet.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Maybe not that cheap, but to me $650 for a phone is PATENTLY RIDICULOUS, regardless how many features it has or what it can do. My Nexus 5 just died, and I got myself a Huawei Honor 5X for 160 last week. On paper the specs look terrible, in use it's just as fast as the N5, and never feels "slow" All the apps I need work, the camera is more than good enough, and there are no showstopper bugs with the screen. Does it feel "cheap?" can't tell you a phone feels like a phone to me. What am I getting for 3x the price? Apps that open 2ms faster?
The ultimate point is that people are at this point, only buying flagship phones because marketing is telling them to. Everyone that has held and used my 5X think it's a high end phone, and will not believe me on the price, until I show them the sales slip. Once the marketing stops working (soon) well, Apple better be prepared.
"Science is the power of man"
They should give the phone for free, and get paid with all the juicy data... Hmm, data.
Sit down and figure out how you can make any decent income off of a $30 phone, even if made in India.
You are going to have to raise capital (maybe from your parent company), start a facility and make a profit to stay in business.
Rough!
Because if you're going to put a completely arbitrary number on something you should at least be precise & specific.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
100 % made by robots and for folks on another continent soon to be out of work since machines can do it cheaper...
I'm on Google Fi, and although I'm overall very happy with the service, flaky networks cause no end of pain.
I use hangouts for SMS (so that I can read them on my computer, too) -- however, this appears (???) to require a decent network connection on the phone, to the extent that sometimes I can make calls but cannot send SMS messages (!). I don't know much about telephony, but I suspect it's because hangouts uses a proper TCP/IP connection, rather than the old school SMS protocol (and I'm guessing the phone calls from the stock dialer make standard -- not VoIP -- calls, such that they work on marginal connections). The fact that it doesn't seem to offer any sort of SMS fallback is very annoying.
Additionally, adding a reminder when I have poor cell service is like pulling teeth...I'm sorry, but adding a reminder should not require an LTE internet connection...
While I commend him for trying to bring down the price of decent Android phones to this range, I'd love to see the problem of Android updates to be solved. That's a pressing issue and it should be given the highest priority at Google.
It sucks when 90% of Apple devices already run iOS 10, while less than 1% of Android phones run Android 7.1.1. Maybe Android updates cannot be solved because ARM devices are basically different platforms but there must be a way to at least fix all the vulnerabilities which are a plenty. Google has the resources to force all vendors follow the same update protocol and have them release their firmware as open source so that Google could apply security fixes/patches and distribute OTA updates instead of uncaring OEMs and network operators.
The Z730 is insanely faster.
It doesn't have as much memory or CPU as the rest of my family's samsungs, but it is more than enough for everything other than videogames, 1080p or 2160p video, or dozens of tabs in a web browser.
Furthermore it is about 8x the specs of my 2000 era desktop, meaning there is no excuse for it not to be smooth and speedy for anything that computer could do given the same hardware specs (and the phone has a slightly smaller screen resolution than my desktop did then, meaning it has even more performance per pixel available!
Note he doesn't say this is the amount they're going to sell them for, it's more likely the manufacturing cost.
So it's great for Google, Apple, Samsung, et al., not so much for those who will be buying them at 20x the price to support obscene profits.
Yeah, I get it. They're out to make a profit. But there's profit, then there is absurd profits. Smartphones easily fall into the latter category.
I might be asking too much, but I'd like to pay $50 for a phone worth $30, or $80 for a phone worth $50 and get 5-10 years of support.
Car analogy : it'd be like buying the cheapest car on the market yet be able to buy oil filters and tires for it, as well as more complicated spare parts. You don't need to buy a BMW Series 7 to be able to get parts for it or get the car fixed when something fails.
So, is hardware Google's next target in commoditization? They did it for software.
What am I getting for 3x the price?
You are getting a phone that won't be immediately abandoned, like most other Android phones. You are paying for the support contract.
What does one get out of a support contract? Security updates. Sure, you can save money on a cheaper phone. Just make sure that you factor in the cost of a potential device compromise due to lacking security updates.
Just look at china importers, you can get easily get a low end smart phone for 50.
I should be able to get software updates for a phone for at least 10 years before I have to replace it. That it costs $300 is not so big of a deal if I'm not buying a replacement every 2 years.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I purchased my windows 10 phone for $50, unlocked. It sure is nice having a phone that a.) browses full websites with a modern browser (no webkit garbage) b.) works like a USB drive like iPhones used to (why did they remove this feature) c.) lasts more than a day on a charge.
Even nicer is I can drag and drop mp3s and flac to the device's microsd card and play them with the native media player. 128gb of storage on my phone for the total price of $100
The market leader for cheap phones is Mediatek, part owners of ADUPS, the wonderful partnership that recently siphoned off texts, location, and call logs from BLU phones.
This is the same Mediatek that was caught doing the same thing with dozens of brands in the Russian market.
The only way to use such a phone safely is an immediate wipe, followed by a 3rd-party OS install to the eMMC.
The market will shortly realize this.
Was in the Philippines and needed a local phone number. Bought a "Cloudphone" for a little less than US$30.
Definitely not top of the line but works just fine:
- Android
- Dual SIM
- Micro SD card slot
- 2 megapixel rear camera (yes, that's all of 2 megapixels)
- front camera (don't know the resolution but it works)
- Access to Play store, all the Google apps, etc.
- Screen seems cheap
It's a bit slow at times but amazing that it works at all
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Without a contract, I got a pair of $1 android phones when we switched carriers. I can't imagine they were losing $50 (the msrp) on each of the phones so I suspect the $30 price has already been reached.. or less.
(they are good phones, nice screen, nothing fancy ... my daughter can watch videos and play games on one and I have the other for dedicated testing of android apps)
it's so overdue
No shit sherlock. They make money selling ads and demographic info. They want every man, woman and child with an income to be tagged.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I bought my smartphone in November 2013 new for $30. It has a hardware keyboard and runs Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread.
You may snicker, but that means it will still mount as a mass storage device when I plug it in to my computer (instead of that MTP abortion), and apps can still write to the SD card.
I never did put a Google account on it, because I'm afraid it would get a bunch of Google updates that would fill the 140MB storage.
I'm fine with F-Droid apps.
But storage is a lot cheaper now than it was when this phone was made.
Didn't they get the memo? "Affordable" is a banned word nowdays
It has to be repealed.
The Nokia N900 didn't have that problem years back - it's a software flaw that shouldn't be present today.
Why should India or any other advanced nation trust a US based firm with links to 5 eye spy networks?
Any data captured from "ads" will be sold onto groups that could build a vast digital picture of India.
What areas, buildings, bases, sites have normal cell signals, what don't allow cell signals? That swarm of "cheap" US cell phones with "ads"could help map some of the most sensitive and secure sites.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and UK would get to buy into the results that build up a vast digital map of India.
Remember the West missed the India nuclear tests as India kept Western spies out and understood the paths of most of the US spy satellites.
Now vast numbers of engineers, technicians and other staff with sensitive jobs in India will be walking around with US linked cell phones...
What the US did not see looking down with infra-red sensors or with human spies it will uncover with a nations own workers with cell phones.
What the US missed with satellite constellations it hopes to make up for with swarms of cheap cell phones.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Even if the phone are big or heavy they have to be sturdy, mud and rain proof for villages. People are ok with less features. Only one camera please, one radio, one gps, standard AAA-like size batteries, common charger, hand-cranking, throw out accelerometer, flash. Torch light is ok. And dont forget free 100mb connection.
Yes. Some people just want an MFing website. Others are willing to spend an extra 151 bytes on making it readable.
Even showing and hiding replies can be done without script in 98 percent of browsers, using a small amount of CSS3 to restyle a checkbox.
My US cell phone carrier for instance, T-Mobile, is receiving money from Google to stop counting the bandwidth used by youtube against my quota.
Since when is money exchanged for this? I thought T-Mobile allowed video providers to register for Binge On at no charge. A provider just has to recognize when a stream's connection is being throttled and scale back the stream to no more than 1.5 Mbps.
Consider a mapping web application such as Google Maps. Without the ability to position map pieces with CSS, and without the ability to detect real-time requests for movement within the map, how would that work? It'd have to use buttons for north, south, west, east, zoom in, zoom out, enlarge window horizontally, shrink window horizontally, enlarge window vertically, and shrink window vertically, with a full-page reload for each. And every time you click a result shown on the map, another full-page reload. If you claim that these full-page reloads provide a better user experience than the positioning and scripts that underlie Google Maps, I'd be interested to read how you back up this claim.
If your reply is that maps ought to be native executable applications, then good luck emulating a Windows executable on macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android.
We should all be able to self-host whatever we want on our own devices (after all, with IPv6 it's not like we can't all have our own block of IPs)
Even if there is no NAT upstream of you, there may still be a stateful firewall upstream of you that performs all functions that a typical NAT gateway performs except for actual address translation.
No CSS, no Javascript, and no ads would mean a lot less concern about bandwidth and latency
Without the possibility of showing messages from sponsors, how should a writer afford to feed herself in order to continue to write?
$300 is about 40cents/day.
Does that include the cost of properly recycling electronic waste?
I'm confused. Why would you use that? Are you still living in 2010? I used to do stuff like that back before the most common dataplans became 2-5GB options.
I currently get 1000 GB/mo on Xfinity and am on a pay-per-minute cellular plan. Why would I either A. cancel cable Internet in favor of a cellular ISP that offers only 5 GB/mo, or B. double my bill by subscribing to both?
it's called an answering machine
Which became voice mail. But voice mail is still only to one other party, not to all other participants in a multi-party discussion. And nowadays, the extent of messages that I tend to get is "please call me back", be it for privacy reasons (such as not wanting to reveal personal health information to others in the household) or laziness reasons.
Plus you can't Ctrl+F voice mail.
Amazon has the BLU Dash JR for $28.
The best cheap phone in the US is a complicated find. Even in 2016, carriers still love to lock you into contracts for budget phone prices, only to have you pay the full amount back in high monthly fees. A smartphone costs 30$ but which way it will be sold ? That matters.
8% of the market is pretty safe to ignore
Even if iOS is 8 percent of the installed base, that can still be a lot more than 8 percent of the market. For example, if revenue per iOS user for paid apps and in-app purchases is 9.1 times that on Android (source: a six-month-old Business Insider article), an installed base of 8 percent iOS and 92 percent other corresponds to a market of .08*9.1/(.08*9.1+.92*1.0)*100 = 44 percent iOS and 56 percent other.
First, if there's a market, there is no reason not to make specific applications for various combos of hardware and software
Other than lack of capital on the developer's part. If a company lacks the resources to make five different native applications, one for each platform, it can serve more users with one JavaScript web application than with one native application.
Nobody says you have to buy any particular hardware or operating system.
Other than that you need to test on hardware and software similar to what your users are likely to already have.
Also, there is NO reason that today's smartphones need to run a particular OS.
Good luck convincing users to buy and carry a second device running "a different OS" or to abandon their existing investment in paid apps, in-app purchases, and learning time on their existing devices.
That's the thing about general computing
Android devices are general computers, at least at the userland level, but iOS devices are treated as appliances.
you can always write a different OS if you want.
Just because you write an operating system doesn't mean it's practical to deploy said operating system. Not all devices offer ability to unlock the bootloader, nor are most users willing to buy a new device just to be able to unlock its bootloader.
Also, as the Chinese have shown, you can run apps outside of Apple's walled garden without needing to jailbreak the phone.
To which exploit do you refer? Are you referring to 7659's abuse of the Developer Enterprise Program?
Show me a fucking Samsung "flagship" shit-brick that gets more than 18 months of support?
You can't, 'cuz they don't. You're lucky if you see an update for a Samsung phone ever.
$600 buys you a phone and $400 worth of smug self-satisfaction.
I have a $170 Chinese phone that get's timely OTA updates to the latest Android patches. I works great. Performs well and has a HUGE battery. (not to mention dual SIM, which No North American carriers offer)
How much does your plan with unlimited text to U.S. and Canada cost you per month?
I could switch providers and have unlimited across the whole country
Assuming you mean "unlimited voice calls and voice mail".
so the people I know in the US, we just text.
As AmiMoJo wrote above: "Text messages have the same flaw as all plain text communicating formats - it can be hard to infer tone. We invented smilies to help, and now for some reason everyone hates emoji. Make it easier to use and suddenly it sucks." You recommended voice calls and voice mail to work around that problem, and those aren't unlimited on your present plan. This means communicating tone "properly" costs more than not doing so.