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Low-Cost Android One Phones Coming To The US, Says Report (theverge.com)
The Android One platform is a program designed by Google to provide budget-friendly Android smartphones to developing markets. The phones are attractive because they contain no bloatware, competing services, and a lack of software and security updates -- the stuff that most low-end smartphones contain. According to a report from The Information, the program is about to make its way to the U.S. market. The Verge reports: Android One phones have historically been produced by companies you probably haven't heard of, like Micromax, Cherry, and QMobile. Originally Google had a direct hand in detailing what components would go into the phone, but apparently became more flexible over time and eventually expanded the program beyond India to parts of Africa, Spain, and Portugal. Android One may not have been the rousing worldwide success Google was hoping for, but it's still an important initiative for the company. Especially at the low end, there's a lot of incentive for manufacturers to pile on extra software in a bid to make those devices more profitable -- but that could cut against Google's efforts to make its own services more pervasive and popular. If Google really does put some real effort behind Android One, it could make its plans for Android a little clearer. Google itself has taken a stand that it wants to make its own hardware at the high-end of the smartphone market with the Pixel, and if The Information's report is accurate, it wants to ensure that its services are not cut out from the low end.
Did they finally remove all the Google datamining tools that slow down Android to a complete stop then?
the best one says 3G but i bet the us ones will have lte; even blu's lowest has lte. the lava pixel ones not to bad.
If the phone isn't getting even security updates as they come out the OS version it runs, it's not a deal. Google needs to do two things to make it a real deal at any price:
1. Force the carriers to let you update it as they release patches.
2. Actually support the OS.
Having to replace a phone to get security updates is not a deal. It's just an environmentally-unsound model for moving cheap hardware.
No bloatware or Google trying to make its services more pervasive.
Hey, Google? 99% of the bloatware that litters our Android phones IS your services!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Has Google thought of exploring the neglected maket segment of phones that are NOT 5" PHABLETS AND ARE NOT SHIT ?
They also do not need to be thin, don't have to be made of fragile glass and we don't give a shit how tiny the bezel is.
Have they ? Have they considered it ?
My iPhone 6 Plus its battery died so while getting it repaired, I got a cheap Android phone (a second-hand LG Nexus 5). Since I took care to only buy/use apps that appear in both the App Store and Google Play, the shift was easy. I thought, when that expensive phone comes back I'll just sell it.
However, I didn't think it through because when it came to making pictures, I was a bit disappointed. Now shooting photos might not be the most important thing in the world for you, but I've got a three year old daughter and don't want to look at crappy shots later in life. So as soon as my iPhone comes back, I'll be happy to go back to an expensive phone again.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
These days 45% of Slashdotters are right-wing nutjobs. 45% are liberal crybabies. 9.999999% are self-conscious virgins and 0.000001% is me. I'm just awesome.
Hmm, I'm not sure if you just described Slashdot or the USA as a whole.
Hey Google? How much would you charge for a phone without your services? They can be installed on purchase as long as I'm able to uninstall them.
I have no use for many of Google's apps which come preinstalled and can't be removed, and I'd be happy to get back the storage and battery they use (however little that may be).
I'd be nice if the phone came also with root enabled and was officially supported. I have no problem with not being able to use for payments or other things which require a "secure" or certified phone.
I have, in principle, no problem with the data-driven economy. It's, IMO, a legit option as long as there's also an option to only pay with your money (which, sadly, is becoming less and less common these days).
Gotta get to sub-$100
Why would I want that?
the price is nowhere to be seen...
$40 GoPhone at any big box store, and you have an android powered smartphone.
What does a $700 phone actually "do" ?
Unfortunately it seems impossible to buy it on either the US nor Europe. Any ideas on the pricing?
now that it is without bloatware, does it explode anyway ?
I would say it was the best "cheap" phone I had in years.
It cost 6k php (around $120) and I was able to use it for more than a year (1 dropped it numerous times before it gave in last week)
Updates were nice until Nougat and it became slow but tolerable
I would certainly buy another Android one phone if it becomes available again.
It's easy to save on RAM, but RAM is cheap. With the zram module in Linux, you can create a zram block device 2x the size of RAM with mem_limit set to 50% of RAM and experience approximately no performance hit--faulting out of zram is approximately twice as heavy as a worst-case cache miss. I've had a 1GB server run 700MB into zram swap trying to run Gitlab, with 40MB of available RAM (including disk cache), and not show any visible sign of performance degradation; note that that's about 230MB of RAM acting as a compressed cache area for that 700MB, and 770MB of flat RAM available.
This works because CPU isn't pegged to 100% on average across 1 second, and decompression requires something like 23-26 instructions per byte. That means decompressing one page per second on a 1.2GHz core consumes about 0.00887% CPU at 1 cycle per instruction, or 0.0266% at an average 3 cycles per instruction. RAM prefetching is actually huge--a cache miss can cost 48 cycles for 64 bytes (on x86-64) or 0.000256% for a 4096-byte page, at a minimum, with 8-cycle CAS across a CPU, or a whopping 1,200 cycles or 0.0064% for 4096 bytes, although that's never going to happen (it's physically impossible: sequential reads don't need the expensive row precharge before RAS after the first read).
Basically, if your code uses memory infrequently, it has no reason to swap; and if it uses it frequently, then the cost of swapping can be absorbed by prefetch algorithms similar to the ones used by the CPU itself to avoid the above cache miss costs. Standard LRU swap algorithms will prevent swapping out of frequently-used memory; and the delay waiting for a swap-in consumes the bits of unused CPU time in a 99.7%-pegged processor.
The performance hit explodes exponentially at a certain point. If you have 1GB RAM and use 900MB as a compressed swap such that you have 2.8GB available, you're going to have a bad time. If you have 1GB and use 500MB for swap such that you have 2GB available, you'll be fine even under high load.
The problem is the whole phone is made of a SOC which isn't that much cheaper on 1GB versus 2GB; expensive NAND storage; radio chipsets; a battery; an expensive display; and so forth. The SOC isn't even the biggest part, with a cost of like $35 or sometimes in the $20 range for something current-generation for a $400 phone, up to $70-ish for state-of-the-art SOCs. Slap a $100 screen, $80 of TLC NAND, and $40 of boards and components and case around a $30 chip and you have a $250 phone.
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The only people who use the term are the 3rd worlders who think it's ok to barge into someone else's country. Here in the US, it ends Friday at noon.
I think we should call them the cheap chinese battery cell super flare bomb phone
Xenophobia, as the name implies, is a phobia.
Why are you so hateful of the disabled? I hope the xenophobes sue you under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Aren't there already plenty of low-cost options out there? Just because the OS is older or the hardware isn't speced to the gills doesn't mean older phones are unusable. I was using a 3rd Gen Moto G until last week and it served every purpose I NEEDED...only problem was 8 GB of storage. That's my own problem for being to cheap to spend more than $100 on a phone.
I never knew slashdot users to be so xenophobic.
You haven't been paying attention or you browse at +2. Browse at 0 and it's a sea of hateful drek.
Slashdot didn't use to be this way but in the last couple of years the right-wing whackos and the bigots have found it to be a target-rich playground.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
> who think it's ok to barge into someone else's country.
You mean like the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Puritans, the French, British and the poor huddled masses who barged into the Aztecs, Incas, and American-indians country?
All of that will not help you in the slightest if the chipset vendor baked in spyware. Mediatek is the master of the cheap chipset, and they have compromised the OS in both Russia and the US with dozens and dozens of OEM devices.
No GAPPS? No problem.
You are talking about Mexico and Latin America. North America was 99% uncultivated wasteland. Now native Americans have more than they had in all their prior history, preservation and protection of their reservations by the federal government.
It wasn't wasteland, it was all a huge hunting preserve. In some cases you might be right but what was done to the Cherokee nation in Georgia was in my opinion the single biggest atrocity ever perpetrated by the US government. Every time I drive by the capitol dome in Atlanta and see the gold on it there I am ashamed.
Oh honey...
It's just that people are kinda over the whole "he's racis'" thing, and feeling up to speaking their minds again. Under a Democratic-owned system you'll probably receive some bullshit "hate speech" charges, but with the Trumpening in full swing, well...
I want a real Linux.