Will A $20 Smartphone Revolutionise The India Smartphone Market? | TechTree.com

Will A $20 Smartphone Revolutionise The India Smartphone Market?

Performance issues, poor battery life, difficulty in use and shoddy build quality are just a few potential flaws.

 
Will A $20 Smartphone Revolutionise The India Smartphone Market?

Smartphone sales in India are growing at a furious pace, with the country poised to become the world's third largest smartphone market by the year 2017. The biggest contributor to this growth are low-cost devices, but for smartphones to really compete with feature phones in terms of market share they have to get a whole lot cheaper.

 

Chip designer ARM now believes that a $20 (Rs 1,200) smartphone running on Google's Android OS could be coming within the next few months. Currently the cheapest Android devices in the Indian market cost approximately twice as much, but will a $20 device truly be able to kill off the feature phone?

 

The prospects seems alluring, but there are a lot of major hurdles in its way:

 

Battery life: Smartphones and battery life are two things that just don't seem to get along. A low-powered device however such as a $20 phone might be efficient, but taking into account its reduced battery size to lower costs it could suffer a bitter fate. Some feature phones last for days on a charge, and with erratic power schedules in India's hinterland, something that doesn't do that is pretty useless.

 

Performance Issues: Regardless to say, a phone that costs $20 will have some pretty miniscule processing power. ARM believes the phone will have to use a single-core A5 processor and this could bring up some pretty serious performance issues. While Google may claim Android 4.4 KitKat needs just 512MB of RAM to run smoothly, even those numbers seem like a luxury on a phone this cheap.

 

Ease of use: Despite being thoroughly outdated, feature phones are generally a breeze to use. While a $20 smartphone may offer much more in terms features, how useable any of that will be is yet to be seen. The core strength of all smartphones is multitasking, but with such a device that strength could be eliminated.

 

Longevity: Even if the $20 smartphone surprises us with its performance, its targeted customer won't be someone looking to upgrade phones ever so often. As with feature phones there literally isn't that much that can go wrong with them, but with a smartphone, it's a whole new ballgame. Even questions about the build quality need to be raised, especially since the internals of the phone will eat into such a large chunk of the device's cost.

 

These are only a few of the issues that a $20 Android smartphone might face, with less obvious ones such as support for regional languages playing a huge role too. Then comes the issue of omitting a few basic features such as GPS, 3G connectivity, the plethora of sensors in order to make the device cheap. While one may argue that those are but luxuries, they are integral pieces of turning a phone into a smartphone.

 

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Tags : Mobile Phones, Android, $20 Smartphone, ARM, Feature Phones

 
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