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

Follow the leader...

[Hydrian]

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.

Re:Follow the leader...

[hackel]

Comparing this comment, which is about an entirely different market segment, is meaningless. I'm not saying the Pixels aren't overpriced—they are—but not *that* much. But that's for the US/European market. India is a completely different landscape, where many people have a very difficult time affording a $30 phone. This is still ultimately a good thing, and not hypocritical. It's comparing apples to oranges.

A wise man once said..

[js3]

You don't charge what it costs, you charge what they are willing to pay for..

Easily done

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re:Easily done

[BarbaraHudson]

The original web was just fine with no javascript, no css, and no "let's try to make html into a page layout language and let's turn the web browser from an html document viewer into an application platform."

Javascript is a mistake, same as CSS. Just look around, you'll see how bad things have gotten if you take off the rose-colored glasses.

Text messages have no problem with usability, even though they're limited to plain text and the occasional image. Sure a heck of a lot better than twitter.

Forums such as slashdot could easily be replaced by bringing back usenet. Threading discussions were around long before the web. So were text-only BBSes that were actually more secure than anything you'll see nowadays on the web. 99% of the web today is shit - and that's if you're being optimistic.

Re:Easily done

[Wycliffe]

Just to make a website that was consistent in look...

That's the whole problem. Html was never supposed to have a consistent look across devices then we tacked on pixel perfect precision, javascript, css and everyone did it slightly different. Oh, and we also decided to allow best guess rendering so install of giving a syntax error, a page still tries to render so broken, sloppy, incorrect pages with missing tags, etc... still render on some browsers and not others. Now it's a horrible mess. Just look at jquery. It's an amazing feat of what can be hacked together but you shouldn't have to do thousands of hacks just to get something to render correctly. Html/css/javascript should be scrapped and we need something with strict syntax checking that works uniformly across all browsers. You could even do it in the existing browsers. Just like at one time we had gopher:// and we have ftp:// there is no reason we can't have http2:// and have browsers slowly start adding it but it needs to have strict rules not the lazy rules that we currently have.

Re:Easily done

[stephanruby]

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.

Yeah, that's not the solution they're going for. Instead of a killing ads, they've decided to kill off net neutrality instead. 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.

Plus, cell phone carriers are already receiving a rev-shares of the google ads that flow through their networks, so an ad-free experience is the last thing that Google has on its mind (not that I am surprised of course, advertising is the bread and butter of Google).

Re:Easily done

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Usenet died because it couldn't control spam and the UI was hard for normal people to use. At the other extreme you have shit like Facebook, but between the two you can build very usable web sites. What we need is to engineer browsers to block the abuse and only allow the good stuff, which is hard but not impossible. The Tor Browser is making good progress.

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.

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.

Re:OK

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 2 problems:

#1 Too many players are involved in approving updates for Android. Google first releases updates, then the manufacturer has to approve and push the updates, then the service provider has to approve and push the updates. Usually the manufacturer or service provider don't do this, would rather you purchase a new phone then to get the latest bell ans whistles from a phone you already paid for.

#2 The profit for most Android smartphones is so razer thin due to competition, that releasing updates eats in to whatever small profit margin they make on those devices. Remember you cannot just release the patch that google releases, you need to test it to see if works with all your pre-installed crapware and your loader , your hardware. And if it does not you need to pay somebody to re-write the software and test all over again. By the time you are done, there is an even more recent version that is out and the process starts all over again.

What are you getting? Support.

[WD]

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.

It doesn't matter if it's $30 or $300

[OrangeTide]

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.

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:And they will be covered in spyware.

[networkBoy]

EMMC spec allows for locking the OS partition. If they do that you *can't* wipe it.

I already have one...

[mspohr]

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

Re:Lower, try $50

[tlhIngan]

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

Webkit garbage? It's a desktop browsing engine, powering some very popular browsers in various incarnations (Chrome uses a Webkit derivative). Webkit is as much "desktop class browsing" as Trident or whatever is used now.

As for USB Mass Storage, phones stopped using it because it is quite limiting. If you plug your phone into your computer, suddenly you can't use your phone anymore. This is because the internal storage is now used by the computer and cannot be touched. Sure, perhaps your phone has a special private data store area so at least basic functionality works, but it's still a pain. Especially a lot of people plug their phones into their PC's USB port to charge at work. If it mounts, that also means no more listening to music via their phones, because it had to unmount the partition holding all the music.

Most people find this inconvenient - why can't their phone work and charge at the same time?

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.