Smartphones are awesome, but for many people they’re out of reach due to financial constraints. In America, where you can get just about anything for less than $200 with a 2 year contract, the real costs of handsets is something consumers are frankly not familiar with. Tell them that the iPhone goes for somewhere around $650, before tax, and they’ll look at you as if you’ve just escaped from a mental institution. This is where people like Huawei and ZTE, the latter who in Q4 became the 4th largest handset vendor worldwide, step in. They put Android on the lowest set of system specifications that it’ll run on and then sell said device either straight to consumers, or more commonly to operators, who then slap their name on the front. “In 2010, operators like Vodafone and Orange kick started the low cost smartphone market with devices in the $150 range,” says Anthony Cox, analyst at Juniper Research, later adding that “pricing of smartphones will come down to $80 by 2015.”
How many of these low end devices are going to be sold? Roughly 185 million during the 2015 calendar year according to Juniper. Just to put that number into some perspective, 2010 was the first year that Nokia managed to ship more than 100 million smartphones. They’re the only company that has done that so far. What will a sub $100 2015 smartphone look like is something I’m terribly eager to see. Right now, for about $150, you can pick up a Huawei Ideos, which has a 2.8 inch 320 x 240 pixel display, WiFi, GPS, 3G, a 3.2 megapixel camera, and it runs Android 2.2. For most people, that’s more than enough, and it’s an excellent way for them to see what this whole internet in your pocket thing is all about.
It’s kind of hard, isn’t it? Using a feature phone after you’ve become so used to a smartphone. How much longer can companies keep on making feature phones? At some point people will just stop buying them.