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.

Comments

Maybe not that low...

[Ayanami_R]

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.

And they will be covered in spyware.

[emil]

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.

Re:Easily done

[BarbaraHudson]

In other words, you were doing it wrong. HTML was NOT supposed to be about layout or presentation. That was supposed to be entirely left to the client side. It wasn't only to be html to be rendered in a specific way by a web browser. You were supposed to be able to make your own decisions of how it was to be rendered on your end - this way, everything would have a consistent look and feel that was good for the end user. A person with low vision would use software that rendered it differently, for example. It's people wanting shit like you wanted that fucked it up. You should have just stuck to posting links to pdfs if you wanted that much control over look.

Security implications

[AHuxley]

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.