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Google CEO Says Next Wave Of Affordable Smartphones Should Cost $30 (phandroid.com) 183

Posted by msmash from the dirt-cheap-smartphones dept.
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.
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Google CEO Says Next Wave Of Affordable Smartphones Should Cost $30 More

Google CEO Says Next Wave Of Affordable Smartphones Should Cost $30

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  • Follow the leader... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hydrian ( 183536 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @04:14PM (#53619299) Homepage

    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: (Score:3)

      by hackel ( 10452 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        We are talking Google here, the nosey and controlling company that will cook elections to suit it's profit margins and the egos of it's executive team. A $30 dollar phone means sticking it in every device, TVs, Fridges, Stoves, Microwaves, Front doors, Electric Beds, basically anywhere it can phone home to report on targeted, immediate advertisements, the really truly evil specifically individually targeted advertisements, to manipulate the choices of that targeted individual and in the future politically c

    • And they will be covered in spyware. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by emil ( 695 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @05:47PM (#53619883)

      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.

    • This is a mattee of greed and taxes. The first ifone did cost right around usd 22 with assembly.

  • A wise man once said.. (Score:3)

    by js3 ( 319268 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @04:15PM (#53619311)

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

    • That only works if the price they're willing to pay is higher than the production cost.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by harrkev ( 623093 )

      When $100 may mean the difference between your kids eating that week or not, what you ask can be hard to swallow.

  • Easily done (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara.jane.hudson@nospAM.icloud.com> on Friday January 06, 2017 @04:21PM (#53619359) Journal

    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.

    • Ad-free solves 90%+ of the bandwidth problem for many uses.

      Making up statistics improves the quality of a post 67.5%.

      With the most popular smartphone plans being several gigs, ads don't even come close being a bandwidth problem. Maybe you switched your numerator and denominator somewhere. 10%- sounds like a more appropriate number for your comment.

      • Are you sick? See those image ads? And the javascript and css all from different servers? All the trackers? Why do you think pages render so much faster with adblock? Quit making up shit, you're part of the problem. Or better yet, go watch some more videos of people playing games or whatever.

        • I already did. I just saw a video. It came in on my Facebook feed and instantly decimated the bandwidth used by those adverts into complete obscurity. Guess what, most people don't use the internet to read text. Most people bounce their own photos and content around, most people watch video, for some mobile phone users the browser even rates below mapping applications in terms of bandwidth consumption.

          Hence why I said 10% of people not 0%.

          Claiming it's 90% is just showing utter ignorance.

          • Many of the images on facebook are images of text - crappy sayings shared by people for no real reason. Total waste of bandwidth because people can't be original and others are trying to get shares by posting their text messages as images. As for video - I try to avoid it because it's mostly crap, and if it's autoplay then it's a given that it's 100% crap. Doesn't matter what site.

      • With the most popular smartphone plans being several gigs, ads don't even come close being a bandwidth problem.

        I blew my 4 gig cap once by visiting two web pages. I dont know if you keep track of ads and all, but they constitute the majority of the data winging into my phone.

        • Thank you for your anecdote. I'll file you in with the 0.000001% of internet users who managed to do that. Now if you'll excuse me my colleagues (normal people) are trying to show me a video on their phone.

          Note how I said 10% in my above comment? Congratulations on falling into that category. I'm sure many slashdot users will. Most people however do not have adverts as the primary bandwidth user.

          • Thank you for your anecdote. I'll file you in with the 0.000001% of internet users who managed to do that. Now if you'll excuse me my colleagues (normal people) are trying to show me a video on their phone.

            Note how I said 10% in my above comment? Congratulations on falling into that category. I'm sure many slashdot users will. Most people however do not have adverts as the primary bandwidth user.

            Are you having a bad day or something? Pretty testy reply for a simple anecdote on my part. Didn't mean to upset ya.

            • Are you having a bad day or something?

              Well actually. I got to bed at 3am, and at 5am I got woken up by my sister who had to call to tell me that it was OMG snowing outside, and then I couldn't get back to sleep for ages.

              So actually yeah I had a bad day, sorry :-)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            Now if you'll excuse me my colleagues (normal people) are trying to show me a video on their phone.

            It's easier to ask "Can it wait for Wi-Fi?" for a video than for text.

            Most people however do not have adverts as the primary bandwidth user.

            You'd be surprised at how many text articles on major news sites have video ads between paragraphs nowadays. I used to be able to block them all with Flashblock, and later SWF click-to-play functionality built into Firefox, until browser publishers started making SWF cilck-to-play the default and ad networks wised up. Now I instead use tracking protection built into Firefox, which works because all major video ad providers happen to track

            • It's easier to ask "Can it wait for Wi-Fi?" for a video than for text.

              I'm confused. Why would you use that? Are you still living in 2010? I used to do stuff like that back before the most common dataplans became 2-5GB options.

              You'd be surprised at how many text articles on major news sites have video ads between paragraphs nowadays.

              You'd be surprised how little "major news sites" or indeed internet browsers in general contribute to people's data usage. The vast majority of traffic happens through dedicated apps now, and Facebook has yet to fuck over it's users like major social media sites have.

              • I'm confused. Why would you use that? Are you still living in 2010? I used to do stuff like that back before the most common dataplans became 2-5GB options.

                I currently get 1000 GB/mo on Xfinity and am on a pay-per-minute cellular plan. Why would I either A. cancel cable Internet [slashdot.org] in favor of a cellular ISP that offers only 5 GB/mo, or B. double my bill by subscribing to both?

    • 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 br

      • So why can't someone just build a web browser that renders only the most basic html, no javascript or css or even images, and be done with it?

        • So why can't someone just build a web browser that renders only the most basic html, no javascript or css or even images, and be done with it?

          Last time I looked you could disable all that stuff in Opera with checkboxes. There are ways to do it in firefox as well.

          • The last time I looked, Opera didn't work any more. It was so bad that they should have been ashamed of themselves. And now that the Chinese control it ...

            And no, you can't disable everything in Firefox any more. Even using add-ins that block downloading css and javascript don't work properly if it's in the head of the document. And then there's disabling embedded data, such as base64-encoded images, instead of links to an image. And disabling individual html tags.

      • 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.

        Since when is money exchanged for this? I thought T-Mobile allowed video providers to register for Binge On at no charge. A provider just has to recognize when a stream's connection is being throttled and scale back the stream to no more than 1.5 Mbps.

    • Put your money where your mouth is. Use Lynx? Most geeks know about it yet it isn't taking the internet over by storm. Why is that?

      • I've used both links and lynx. They're FAST. Why aren't they taking the internet by storm? They don't come installed by default by Microsoft.

        • Chrome is fast and good enough for most folks. People and site owners want functionality. AdBlock really helps with bad scripts. I use the AdBlock browser on my phone occasionally when a site has a horrible script that won't load a site

  • Maybe not that low... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ayanami_R ( 1725178 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @04:22PM (#53619369)

    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.

    • But it is a Huawei. It has all the spyware mandated by China preinstalled. Chinese hackers will be able to get your bank account details.

      • It does? You have personally seen the rom I am running and protections I installed and audited it and came to that conclusion? Shutup.

    • 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.

    • PATENTLY RIDICULOUS, regardless how many features it has or what it can do

      Arbitrary sum of money is ridiculous given a premise of potentially limitless functionality? Your post is full of HYPERBOLE with capitalisation and everything!

    • 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.

      Most phones are kept for 2 years, so you're talking 90c a day, less than a newspaper or cup of coffee, for something that does a lot more.
      Sure not everyone can afford 90c/day for a mobile computer/media device/GPS/payment and application platform, but for those that can, it is still pretty good value.

  • Sit down and figure out how you can make any decent income off of a $30 phone, even if made in India.

    You are going to have to raise capital (maybe from your parent company), start a facility and make a profit to stay in business.

    Rough!

  • 100 % made by robots and for folks on another continent soon to be out of work since machines can do it cheaper...

  • I'm on Google Fi, and although I'm overall very happy with the service, flaky networks cause no end of pain.

    I use hangouts for SMS (so that I can read them on my computer, too) -- however, this appears (???) to require a decent network connection on the phone, to the extent that sometimes I can make calls but cannot send SMS messages (!). I don't know much about telephony, but I suspect it's because hangouts uses a proper TCP/IP connection, rather than the old school SMS protocol (and I'm guessing the ph

  • While I commend him for trying to bring down the price of decent Android phones to this range, I'd love to see the problem of Android updates [altervista.org] to be solved. That's a pressing issue and it should be given the highest priority at Google.

    It sucks when 90% of Apple devices already run iOS 10, while less than 1% of Android phones run Android 7.1.1. Maybe Android updates cannot be solved because ARM devices are basically different platforms but there must be a way to at least fix all the vulnerabilities which ar

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 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 up

      • It sounds like Google needs to do a better job of releasing security updates that only fix the security vulnerability instead of updating the entire OS.

        For an example, if someone finds a problem with a subsystem like OpenSSL, they should be able to update just this package in the background OTA instead of saying "Oh, you need to upgrade from Android 6.1 to 6.1.1 now!" and then ship 6.1.1 to the cell phone providers who then need to do their own testing before releasing it to their customers.

      • #2 : even if carrier, OEM and crapware are out of the loop, support for the SoC vendor itself might be not all great. You might never be able to run Android n+1 just because of the SoC, even if the bar is not that high such as get linux kernel n+4 running, it has to do so with all built-in components ; the SoC vendor has low margins of its own and has moved on to the next chip.
        It's like that old printer or scanner that runs on Windows 98, 2000 and XP but not Vista/7 and up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        then the service provider has to approve and push the updates

        If my phone is GSM and unlocked, and I have removed the SIM and restarted the phone with no SIM, then who is its "service provider"?

  • Note he doesn't say this is the amount they're going to sell them for, it's more likely the manufacturing cost.

    So it's great for Google, Apple, Samsung, et al., not so much for those who will be buying them at 20x the price to support obscene profits.

    Yeah, I get it. They're out to make a profit. But there's profit, then there is absurd profits. Smartphones easily fall into the latter category.

    • But there's profit, then there is absurd profits. Smartphones easily fall into the latter category.

      Only for one company, really.

  • I might be asking too much, but I'd like to pay $50 for a phone worth $30, or $80 for a phone worth $50 and get 5-10 years of support.

    Car analogy : it'd be like buying the cheapest car on the market yet be able to buy oil filters and tires for it, as well as more complicated spare parts. You don't need to buy a BMW Series 7 to be able to get parts for it or get the car fixed when something fails.

  • It doesn't matter if it's $30 or $300 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @05:25PM (#53619747) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • I should be able to get software updates for a phone for at least 10 years before I have to replace it.

      Why because you say so? Why 10 and not 20 or 50?

      That it costs $300 is not so big of a deal if I'm not buying a replacement every 2 years.

      $300 is about 40cents/day. I'm willing to bet you spend more than than on other shit that offers less value.

  • I already have one... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @06:29PM (#53620139)

    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

  • No shit sherlock. They make money selling ads and demographic info. They want every man, woman and child with an income to be tagged.

  • Didn't they get the memo? "Affordable" is a banned word nowdays

    It has to be repealed.

  • Security implications (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Friday January 06, 2017 @10:14PM (#53621519) Journal
    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.

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