
One of the many significant announcements at the recent Google I/O developers conference was Android One. The program was formally unveiled with one central goal in mind, reaching the next 5 billion people in the world. These are the ones without a smartphone, mostly in emerging markets like India, China and so on. Google will be partnering with companies in the supply chain to provide a turnkey solution for many OEMs that are currently driving the budget smartphone segment in emerging markets. Android One involves a combination of affordable reference hardware, handpicked by Google, and stock Android software, with updates directly from Mountain View. The first three OEMs to sign up for this program are from India, which has familiar, but rather important, implications for the budget smartphone market. For explaining how this will affect the market, lets first take a sample of it in its current form. Right now, OEMs like Lava, Karbonn, Xolo, Micromax and Spice often compete with very similar phones. They mostly all have the same set of specifications at the intersection of many price points, appropriate for that set of hardware, which leads us to believe certain things about them. One, they are already buying reference hardware ...

from Fone Arena - The Mobile Blog http://ift.tt/1rMrgPc
via
Blogger Comment