From my knowledge of the phone industry, and one of out past client's venture into it, the minimal viable budget for a cellphone project is $1M these days on the low side.
- MOQs of all truly essential assemblies are huge: high-end PCBs, custom made camera modules, custom cut LCD/OLED cells, antenna-body integrated assemblies
- RnD is long and torturous, even without Android atrocity: RF-tuning for high perf wireless, tiny high density PCBs development, lots of prototyping for bodywork and LCD assemblies
- SCM challenges are monumental even for factories in South China: constant shortages and high lead times of speciality passives, time spent waiting for parts, while burning money, logistics to and from module integrators...
Smartphones are becoming like jet engines: while parts count in general go down per unit of functionality, and they become simpler for non-IC parts of the design, very few can make them competitively as the supply chain gets longer, and 3rd parties are now taking bigger and bigger cuts with each year.
Also the campaign seems to be lazy copy+paste edit of an earlier (failed?) one. Mentions of "if we reach our stretch goals" in the perks but there are no such goals mentioned.
Don't need R&D or custom parts if you use existing designs and existing part lines from China. This is the same design used by many Xiaomi phones and lots of clones/rebrands. Someone mentioned even Siemens has one.
> Hardware is less exciting to me than the Software, and the Operating systems. Competition there would be nice
Thank you, I'm glad someone is saying it. Smartphone hardware matured several years ago, where even a $10 Walmart prepaid phone is good enough for everything except mobile gaming. It's long past time we had more than iOS and Android to choose from as a first class citizen. I realize there will likely never be a competitive third party OS on mobile (even a behemoth like Microsoft gave up just when their mobile OS was getting really, really good), but I'd settle for just the ability to buy an affordable device that can run whatever I want to put on it.
With this device, the PinePhone, and (holding my nose) the Librem 5, we now have enough choices on the hardware side to give the OS devs incentive to make their offerings polished enough to be daily drivers.
If the 10$ smartphone you mentioned actually exists, I'd like to know how I (as a German in Germany) could buy a couple. At that price point I'd feel comfortable degrading them to a wall-mounted light switch or doorbell repeater. Generic IoT stuff.
They exist and you can get them at Walmart, Family Dollar, and other bargain-basement stores. They are at that price point because the prepaid carrier (usually TracFone or similar) expects the buyer to purchase blocks of "minutes" and "megabytes" to use with the phone. It's basically a loss leader.
Just use old phones from eBay :). More like 50 Euros, but still rather cheap and powerful enough for any IoT use.
Reminds me of that guy who used an iPad for a wall mounted information panel (weather, transport time, traffic conditions, some other stuff). Pretty cool.
They are NOT manufacturing a phone from scratch. Read my detailed post on this thread. At first I thought this campaign was crazy, but it might actually be OK. You have to dig deeper into the numbers.
Big companies lost interest in licensing many year ago. Few companies have interest manufacturing Nexuses for Google these days, and smaller companies would get no chances at all.
HTC was the last big OEM amicable to co-branding or white label terms. They tried to build an own brand, and failed miserably because they failed to perceive how marketing works in the West. Maybe they will get more agreeable again.
Yeah, indeed, I'd wonder what'd happen if you asked i.e. oneplus to make a version of a model very open and start hacking away. Perhaps you can even convince them there is a market or that it is worth the experiment. Or would they fear Google?
Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android (that doesn't fly with e.g. Samsung making TVs with their OS and Sony making cameras that runs non-android I guess)?
Somehow it doesn't seem possible to prevent HTC from building one smartphone and sell it either themselves or via another brand as an android phone, while at the same time selling the same design (screen peripherals etc) with some minor chages, maybe a slightly different SoC, to someone who wants to sell a phone with a different OS? How exactly would the license forbid it?
Obviously google owns the license and can probably unilaterally revoke it for anything they see as unpleasant (such as building OEM phones that run linux, instead of just TVs that do?) - but is this really expressed explicitly in their agreement? How?
> Are you saying that manufacturers that produce hardware that runs android are banned from also selling hardware (being an OEM manufacturer) that does not run android
It is the other way around companies that produce Google Android phones (with play store) are banned from producing anything Android not based on Googles stack. Amazon had to find out the hard way that basing your OS on Android makes it hard to find a manufacturer.
Of course this is not globally true. Various countries already informed Google just what they thought of that kind of licensing abuse. That led to Google carving out new licensing regions for every lawsuit and outright boycotting Turkey when they mandated the same treatment as the EU.
You can't produce a custom design based on Android since nearly all manufacturers signed a License agreement to only sell Android phones blessed by Google, this is required to sell even one phone with the Google software stack. Amazon already went through that with its Kindle product line.
From my knowledge of the phone industry, and one of out past client's venture into it, the minimal viable budget for a cellphone project is $1M these days on the low side.
- MOQs of all truly essential assemblies are huge: high-end PCBs, custom made camera modules, custom cut LCD/OLED cells, antenna-body integrated assemblies
- RnD is long and torturous, even without Android atrocity: RF-tuning for high perf wireless, tiny high density PCBs development, lots of prototyping for bodywork and LCD assemblies
- SCM challenges are monumental even for factories in South China: constant shortages and high lead times of speciality passives, time spent waiting for parts, while burning money, logistics to and from module integrators...
Smartphones are becoming like jet engines: while parts count in general go down per unit of functionality, and they become simpler for non-IC parts of the design, very few can make them competitively as the supply chain gets longer, and 3rd parties are now taking bigger and bigger cuts with each year.