$30 Unlocked Android Smartphones To Launch in India This Month (factordaily.com)
Several Indian smartphone manufacturers including Micromax, Intex and Lava plan to unveil a slew of Android smartphones priced around $30 in the coming weeks, Indian news outlet FactorDaily reported on Tuesday. These handsets would run Android Oreo Go, a lite version of Google's mobile operating system first unveiled last year. The report sheds light on India's smartphone market: With cheap smartphones, Google and the phone vendors hope to ride the wave of mass scale internet access on mobile phones in India. From a monthly consumption of 20 crore (200 million) GB of data about 16 months ago, Indians now consume over 150 crore (1.5 billion) GB a month making the country No. 1 among mobile data consuming countries. Much of this change is credited to aggressive data pricing plans by Reliance Jio, which launched services in September 2016.
Don't worry, you'll still be able to gloat from your parent-provided basement.
No sig today...
Heads up. You will hear this soon, maybe make this a HEADLINE on /. ? or fuck your thread burying bullshit.
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/igor-anatolyevich-sushchin
2018 and I'm still worrying about not exceeding my (already expensive) mobile data plan. Entrenched monopolies and state protectionism in Western countries mean we're not getting enough affordable connectivity for the next decades. Tech is going to migrate to countries like India where affordable infrastructure is being built.
Why canâ(TM)t we have this? Why must there be so many different standards?
1 crore appears to be 10 million, i.e. 10^7. It's a number superstition thing, isn't it?
their current data usage is 1.4 exabytes per month
Could be worse, comrade. Your destination needs paved roads, trains with adequate seating inside - not on top - and rivers without dead bodies floating down them.
https://www.chinasmack.com/fil...
production in india down 10%, people getting run over up 50%
There is definitely a market for cheap handsets here. Not everyone lives in LA, SF, NYC, or Austin, and has the dosh to buy a new iPhone X or whatever Apple is selling on release date. In fact, most of the country is barely getting by, with the best times in memory all behind them.
It isn't like phone tech is improving by leaps and bounds anyway. Any phone made recently has a decent front and back camera, and Android makers have decent fingerprint scanners. Hell, Android has had FaceID since around 2013, with the ability for the phone to ask the person to blink, which is a security technique that hasn't been gotten around yet.
As for CPUs, if apps didn't continue to be such bloated pigs, there wouldn't be a need for octocores on up, with bigger devices needed for more surface area for cooling.
As for storage, 16-32 gig internal, then a MicroSD card slot. This way, if someone wants 400 gigs of storage, that is easily accomplished.
None of this is rocket science here. The only thing that really is an obstacle is selling the devices in the US is the fact that companies think every Tom, Dick, and Harry can blow quad digits for a phone... which is not true.
Well let *us* not. But remember it's an article written by Indians about Indians for an Indian audience that just happened to be picked up by Slashdot. And it seems crore is culturally a unit predating the colonial dissemination of English in that region.
They're getting smartphones to those who couldn't otherwise afford it. As India grows, they'll have a smart phone preference. I equate this to free cigs for soldiers in WWII except in this case it isn't free, but cheap and affordable; for some this could be a week's pay, and within reach.
You can say a bunch of things about google, but getting these handsets to the cheapness of $30 opens a lot of windows for those who had none before.
I don't read AC
The cheapest Android smartphone I can find on Alibaba is $17 wholesale. But spend a few dollars more and you can get a passable 1GbRAM, MTK6735WM Quad Core Cortex A7 model with a passable 5 inch screen for $20.
http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Cheapest-Smartphone-4g-Free-Shipping-LEAGOO_60643252407.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.1.106dab681KIJ2S
So PRICE is not the issue for Android phones, they usually give me one free with the data plan. It's the ongoing data plan cost thats the obstacle.
If you wanted a smartphone would you buy a refurbishes Samsung S3 or this phone that doesn't even run a full Android? But heck, another flop and perhaps Pichai will get the boot, and we can finally get a decent version of Android, instead of his endless attempts to cripple it in favor of ChromeOS.
Could be worse, comrade. Your destination needs paved roads, trains with adequate seating inside - not on top - and rivers without dead bodies floating down them.
https://www.chinasmack.com/fil...
That's a good deliberate attempt to malign India's image. Images are not untrue. But that percentage is low. We have beautiful cities and sceneries too. Search for Leh ladakh and Kerala in google and see yourself. I will not give any link to mark my words. Try searching "Incredible India" or "Beutiful India". In India- you get what you search+ few more .
The important question is, why can't we have this on high-end devices?
I'm sure a lot of people would prefer a simple OS over the normal "bloat edition", even if they have good hardware.
Still makes more sense than launching a Tesla.
And I thought Detroit was bad. This place you call home is a sewer, a cemetary, and things I can't put into words because it is too unreal.
How can it be that none of you can see it today, never mind that last few thousand years?
That's C_r_ore. Too bad there's no way to look things up from your smart phone.
That'll be 2£ 10s 6d, but for you we'll make it an even $20.
Please let's not start using new or obscure unitz of measurement that provid no significant improvement over currently popular units.
In this case, one could say Crore is probable better than Billion as a unit because it can be expressed as a clean number "150" that is short an concise without needing decimal places. Also, 1/6th of the world's population use the term "Crore" that hardly makes it obscure. That's a higher percentage of the world than uses terms such as "miles" or "pounds (weight)" or "feet" or "furloughs per cubic quart".
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
considering an ARM chip is a few bucks to make , i'm not surprised , the big phone manuf. have been gouging big time following apple , and this is why i dumped samsung for a huawei at half the price for better handset.
"but getting these handsets to the cheapness of $30", they're already under $30. e.g. Intex will discount you a phone for 1600 rupees (i.e. $25) as long as you top up with $30 worth of data over the next 18 months. This is slightly cheaper than Jio's plan (mentioned above) that works out to about $30/year +$30 for the phone... except Intex's phone runs full Android 7 and comes with 1GB or RAM, so its a more attractive product than a cut down Android version. There's no price saving here, Ram is a mask printed onto silicon, 512MB, 1GB, it's all the same cost.
Those who forget "Windows for emerging markets" are deemed to repeat its stupidity.
This is what I get for posting while I am barely awake.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
A $30 phone that makes phone calls, and can send and receive text messages. It should also have a display with a clock so I can use it as a pocket watch. Also make it look like a Star Trek (The Original Series) communicator. Then offer an unlimited call and texting plan for $10-15 a month.
I bet there are tons of people that would buy something like this.
but...a quart is a unit of volume. why would I need to cube it?
Still a shithole.
It is just bits, ones and zeros. Why the world cannot coalesce on common transmission standards for common communications is mind boggling.
Yes, indian sources often use crore. and lakh, too.
Just make sure you stay away from the designated shitting streets, which are apparently a thing. :-P
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Funny, I'm 65 and I've never seen any volume knob labelled in quarts.
#DeleteFacebook
After a quick search on aliexpress I found Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 for $18 including shipping
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Unlock-S5830i-Samsung-Galaxy-Ace-S5830-Original-Android-5MP-WIFI-GPS-Unlocked-Mobile-Phone-Free-Shipping/32833661825.html
Try searching for âoeKerala slums.â
The images are not untrue because most of India lives in appalling poverty resulting from socially-accepted, systematic corruption and misgovernment. Cheating is deeply ingrained in every aspect of Indian society: cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating in any way possible. A sociey without integrity and honor will never rise above the filth in which it rolls.
Fail. You cared enough to respond to my post.
This is your idea of "care"? You must be the most lonely loser on the whole planet
Most of them are chinese brand phones, and would need jailbreaking/exploits to actually be secure/not spy on you, but there are phones for sale out there in that price range.
The problem however is you need the right tech stores to supply them.
Fry's Electronics and Microcenter often carry these. Some Walmarts *MIGHT* carry these, but the majority of the phones are NOT on the major provider's services. They are on SimpleTouch, MetroPCS, etc. The irony of the matter is, most of these phones are similiar cpu/memory specs to the 100+ dollar big brand phones, the only weak facets being the cameras or display, neither of which are low enough resolution to not still beat out half of the 100-200 dollar phones from even a couple years ago.
Look around and you CAN find them, although the more rural the town, the fewer choices you have, which might result in needing to leverage a friend in another town to hit that pricepoint.
Maybe it is time to start two way supply chains between rural America and urban america. Help get cheap tech out to the rural areas while helping get cheap chemicals, food, etc back to the urban populace, without all the middlemen fixing prices.
If you buy a phone which haven't been locked down then it's not an unlocked phone. It's a phone without any locks. Or just a phone.
Only locked down phones can be unlocked.
He is providing the 5mhz service at a fraction of the cost and at a better bandwidth than any American ISP (Put your top 10 names here).
Pretty soon, he will do the same in the USA, buying infrastructure from the top 10, and then wam bam bang, he will offer a service coast to coast to compete with V,C,A,G and whoever else.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada