Google Targets Low-Cost Android One Phone At African Markets 43
jfruh writes: In order to meet its goal of bringing Android to five billion users, Google needs to get smartphones into the hands of people in the developing world. The company's Android One program aims to do just that. Already active in India, the program is now bringing an $88 smartphone to West Africa. “The software on Android One devices automatically updates to the latest version of Android and will get the Android M release after release. The goal is to provide a consistent and uncompromising smartphone experience, for everyone,” Google VP of product management, Caesar Sengupta, said.
No need for Firefox OS any longer. (Score:5, Insightful)
This puts to rest the final argument that Firefox OS supporters had to justify its existence: that Android phones were too expensive in third world nations.
Of course, that argument was quite weak to begin with. Low-cost used Android phones are already plentiful in such regions, and already widely used. And now new Android phones will be available and affordable, too.
Since Android phones can already run HTML/JS/CSS web apps, they should be able to run Firefox OS apps, too. Although in practice, there aren't really any Firefox OS apps worth using elsewhere.
Mozilla, it's time to shut down the Firefox OS project. Firefox OS has already gotten some of the most scathing reviews of all time [arstechnica.com], and it's seeing pretty much no adoption at all.
The worst thing about Firefox OS is that it has taken resources away from improving Firefox, the only product from Mozilla that really sees any use (although its market share is dropping, too). If Firefox OS was cancelled, the money and people involved could be moved over to working on Firefox instead. They could strip out Pocket, Hello, Australis, and all of the other completely unwanted changes that have been made lately. After that is done, and Firefox's UI is usable again, they could tackle some of the decade-old bugs and performance problems that have yet to be fixed.
It's a real shame that Firefox OS wasn't cancelled sooner. It was clear from the onset that it was a failed project. The resources wasted on it could have been put to much better use elsewhere.
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Still kind of expensive (Score:2)
There are lots of people in Africa who can afford an $88 smartphone, but that doesn't make it a cheap smartphone. You can find brand new Android and Windows Phone devices for under $60 [amazon.com] right here in the US. The Android devices probably don't have too great of an update story, but that's an OEM problem and one that Google can obviously avoid. It seems like Google could easily make a device that costs less than $80, and when you're targeting the developing world, I feel like it would be a lot easier to sell a
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I suppose the device makers could do the HAL, but note that Microsoft writes the HAL for Windows. I see that you want to relieve the effort from Google of having to deal with coding for lots of devices, but where is the value to the device maker if you make the device maker have to invest in developing their own hardware abstraction layer?
You'd need to have a reason why device makers would be eager to do that, and honestly, they're not even really all that eager to test and deploy the newest Android to the
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Just because you can buy a cheap phone does not mean it works in an acceptable manner. These $60 phones are running Jelly Bean and have 512MB of storage.
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Mine is pay-as-you-go and is $19 no contract. It has 4GB of storage and Runs Android KitKat 4.4.2. Not sure what planet you are from.
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To take an example straight off the page I linked:
http://smile.amazon.com/BLU-Da... [amazon.com]
$50 at current price, $60 list. That's new, in stock. What do we get for that?
Android 4.4 KitKat (not Jellybean; I don't know what the update story is though)
4GB of storage (not 512MB; still a bit low but adequate and good for the price. Expandable via microSD, of which Amazon will sell you 16GB for $6)
512MB of RAM (are you not clear on the difference between RAM and persistent storage? A little low but fairly typical for low
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Check out Chinese phones and shops, i.e. eFox.
Doogee X5 on pre-sale for $62 (plus S&H):
5.0" 1280x720 pixels, MTK6580 1.3 GHz quad core, 1 GB RAM + 8 GB flash, Android 5.1
5MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0
quad-band 2G/3G GSM, tri-band WCDMA
http://en.efox-shop.com/doogee... [efox-shop.com]
MPIE/Stacy G7 for $66. Only on Android 4.4, but with 2GB RAM and LTE.
5.0 inch 960x540, MTK6582 1.3GHz Quad Core, 2GB RAM + 8GB flash, Android 4.4
8MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0
2G/3G/LTE GSM (all LTE bands for
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update: pandawill sells the Doogee X5 for $60 with free worldwide shipping
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Let's say the smartphone costs on the order of one people's monthly income - similar to buying a desktop computer in the 90s in developed countries. You can't afford to bet on a smartphone that may be a dud - crappy, low quality build, unsupported etc. ; for one thing the vendor may save $1 on flash and you get very crappy one that locks the phone for 15 seconds when doing some of the writes, or you risk it dying.
A few $ more in the BOM may go a long way : higher quality flash, high res screen (800x480), co
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What does "pay-as-you-go" mean?, locked to a carrier but no contract, or unlocked and you happen to use a no-contract SIM card that comes with it?
Updates are Late (Score:2, Informative)
I bought an Android One phone to get regular updates. It took more than 6 months for Google to roll it out to my device. I was expecting an update within 2 weeks of the announcement at Google I/O. They've changed the wording on their website, but at the time it was:
"Android One devices receive the latest version of Android directly from Google. When a new update is released, it can take up to two weeks to reach your device.
So Google broke their promise big time. I wouldn't advise anyone to get an Android On
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Edit: They still promise the above in their "Timing for Software Updates" section in the following link: https://support.google.com/and... [google.com]
Re:Updates are Late (Score:5, Informative)
I bought an Android One phone to get regular updates. It took more than 6 months for Google to roll it out to my device. I was expecting an update within 2 weeks of the announcement at Google I/O.
(I'm an Android engineer.)
The announcement at Google I/O isn't the release. As of today, Android M still has not been released. i think the third and final(?) preview went out early this week, but it's still a preview, not a release.
This is a pretty common misunderstanding of the Android release process. The announcement of a new version and its features comes when the feature set is demonstrably finalized, long before it's actually done and debugged. That means that our code is "feature complete", meaning we can demonstrate all of the features, but in many cases there are still a lot of bugs to fix. In some cases the bugs are of the form "three of the four use cases for this feature aren't implemented yet." (I actually did that this year; I'm responsible for the hardware-backed crypto and when preview1 went out I had completely broken asymmetric crypto. Hardware-backed AES and HMAC worked, but RSA and EC did not. And that was just the big stuff; there were lots of minor features that were broken, too. It's all working now.)
The reason for announcing features and publishing APIs well before the actual release is to give all of the partners and app developers plenty of time to start getting ready for the release.
Unless you're a glutton for punishment, you really don't want the version released at I/O. I know... I've been running M on my Nexus 6 since about February and it has been rather bad at times. Bad, as in the phone app crashing continually, or Google Play Services not running (which takes out pretty much all of the Google apps, plus some), etc. At a couple of points I almost had to abandon Marshmallow and go back to Lollipop because my phone didn't work. It's getting close these days, but it's still not done. I haven't personally run into any problems for a while.
If you really *do* want Marshmallow now, you can always unlock your device and install the third preview. I don't recommend it, but I don't recommend against it, either. Like I said, it's actually working pretty well on my device. But don't be shocked if you find stuff that doesn't work. That's why it's a preview.
So Google broke their promise big time.
Nope, you just misunderstood the promise :-)
The promise is within two weeks of release, not two weeks of first public alpha. And you are happy about that, really you are.
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Can you *please* fix play services wake lock? Since the latest update my Nexus 5 is useless if I ever go into a bad service area and try to send a text or use the maps for several days. It's fucking a lot of people, and I'm seriously considering going back to iOS, because having your phone randomly run out of power in an hour is really, really annoying.
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I believe that is already fixed, and that the fix will be released in the next update of the Play services app. However, I work on the core Android OS not on Play Services, so I don't follow that stuff closely.
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Have you ever considered learning how to test stuff?
LOL.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
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Thanks for listening.
Still too expensive (Score:2)
2015 moto e (Score:1)
Just bought a Quad Core, dual-SIM for ~$50 (Score:1)
I just bought an approx $50 (199 RON) quad core, dual-SIM, KitKat Android phone in Romania. This one is called Myria_Quad, but similar phones, with 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of storage, 480x800 pixels, can be found on Amazon, eBay, and from traditional vendors (I got mine in brick&mortar retail). I'm sure these are already popular in Africa at this price point (if you have that kind of money), so targeting them with $88 phone sounds a bit clueless. That $88 price point is what you charge westerners for the sa
Best way to do it ... (Score:2)
.. would be to sell them to "wealthy" countries too.
They could still sell the more expensive lines (proof: Apple exists).
Never mind the cost; it's battery that counts (Score:3)
I recently watched a documentary on TV about an extended family living a remote existence somewhere in Africa. One of the men had a mobile phone and he was saying it was a day trip to walk to the nearest town to get it charged and he did it about once a week.
Yeah, try that with a smart phone.
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So there's a new market opening up for photovoltaic chargers, you say?