Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

[Raja Bose]

A big reason for slower uptake for Win8 is the metro part of it is not very usable (at least for me) on non-touch laptops/desktops. Hence, the OS adoption rate is tied to folks buying new touch enabled laptops/desktops and that itself is tied to the PC hardware market. Mickey has decided to force that trend in PC hardware and may have planned for initial losses for long-term gains but then they might have initial losses with long-term losses so that's a risk they are apparently willing to take.

[Mort Walker]

^^^Agree 400%.

[SaiK]

just got to read what is metro.. sounds like a nice approach to designing contents.

[Muppalla]

A big reason for slower uptake for Win8 is the metro part of it is not very usable (at least for me) on non-touch laptops/desktops. Hence, the OS adoption rate is tied to folks buying new touch enabled laptops/desktops and that itself is tied to the PC hardware market. Mickey has decided to force that trend in PC hardware and may have planned for initial losses for long-term gains but then they might have initial losses with long-term losses so that's a risk they are apparently willing to take.

My take is that they will kill the hardware with no touch.

See the first realese of this tablet/ultrabook from Lenovo(read the tech specs):

Twist s230u new

It has 500GB HDD with 7200 rpm and also 24GB Solid state disk. This is at about $1000. Now you will the competetion to improve upon this from Dell, Samsung, Acer. Few more things to be improved and who will want an android/I-pad type same sized tablets? The prices will drop.

This is full fledged PC and in future you can put Linux if you hate MS

[anmol]

Btw it's more than $899... note that the Pro does not come with a touch cover...

It does not need touch cover, metro side is actually better than iPad when interacted through touch and on classic desktop the digitizer pen in 100% complete replacement for mice and keyboard.

RB,

Battery life is going to kill the surface Pro.

Compared to Air, its thinner, lighter, with better resolution, with touch support, with front+read camera instead of just front facing camera, with larger battery, and lastly have wacom digitizer support... for same price.

Yup its dead

Samsung will have slew of Note series devices in the next year at an affordable price which will do these functions. As it is the Samsung Note 10.1 is almost there, but not quite, the Note II phablet has been a home run. It will be Android though.

As I said there is nothing in market that can do same for less price. Even a 10 in Android tablet with S-pen is no comparison for something with 3rd gen ivy bridge+1080p+Wacom+windows. One can do photoshop etc and other cannot. Also, handwriting support on Windows 8 is generations ahead of the rest.

A big reason for slower uptake for Win8 is the metro part of it is not very usable (at least for me) on non-touch laptops/desktops. Hence, the OS adoption rate is tied to folks buying new touch enabled laptops/desktops and that itself is tied to the PC hardware market. Mickey has decided to force that trend in PC hardware and may have planned for initial losses for long-term gains but then they might have initial losses with long-term losses so that's a risk they are apparently willing to take.

Also, most of the new touch enabled laptops, desktops, all in ones and convertibles that have been announced will reach stores by the end of this month.. and that is for US. So huge reason is not only that they are forcing "touch" but that there aren't many options right now.

[SaiK]

I don't see a natural progression from mouse to touch screen rather touch pad.. it is just not natural to go and touch the view /output after year long usage of mouse/touch-pad.

However, it remains to be seen how cursor points to exact location can be placed by human touch rather a pointing device.. human fingers can't be that precise., but perhaps do the initial work to come where it needs to point, and wear a more precise pointing cap on the finger, to direct to exact alphabet or graphic pixel point to place the cursor.

jmo

[anmol]

I don't see a natural progression from mouse to touch screen rather touch pad.. it is just not natural to go and touch the view /output after year long usage of mouse/touch-pad.

However, it remains to be seen how cursor points to exact location can be placed by human touch rather a pointing device.. human fingers can't be that precise., but perhaps do the initial work to come where it needs to point, and wear a more precise pointing cap on the finger, to direct to exact alphabet or graphic pixel point to place the cursor.

jmo

Why do you think there is need for " cursor points to exact location" ? Metro and Ribbon is there to give you much bigger hit targets.. and where one needs to be precise one can use either digitizer or the touch/type cover.

OR just plug-in regular mouse and keyboard.

[anmol]

I think we can finally say bye bye to HDD (and to Seagate and Western Digital).

Taiwan engineers defeat limits of flash memory

(Phys.org)—Taiwan-based Macronix has found a solution for a weakness in flash memory fadeout. A limitation of flash memory is simply that eventually it cannot be used; the more cells in the memory chips are erased, the less useful to store data. The write-erase cycles degrade insulation; eventually the cell fails. "Flash wears out after being programmed and erased about 10,000 times," said the IEEE Spectrum. Engineers at Macronix have a solution that moves flash memory over to a new life. They propose a "self-healing" NAND flash memory solution that can survive over 100 million cycles. News of their findings appears in the IEEE Spectrum, discussing flash memory's limitations and the Taiwan company's solution. Macronix is a manufacturer in the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market, with a NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products. Before their solution announcement, though, many engineers inside and outside of Macronix were aware of a life-giving workaround: heat. The snag is that applying heat was not found to be practical. As the Macronix team put it, the "long baking time is impractical for real time operation." Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 °C. They redesigned a flash memory chip to include onboard heaters to anneal small groups of memory cells. Applying a brief jolt of heat to a very restricted area within the chip (800 degrees C) returns the cell to a "good" state. They said that the process does not have to be run all that often. According to project member Hang‑Ting Lue, the annealing can be done infrequently and on one sector at a time while the device is inactive but still connected to the power source. It would not drain a cellphone battery, he added. Macronix estimates that the flash memory cells could beat the 10,000 cycle limit by lasting for as much as for 100 million cycles but a commercial product is not imminent. Instead, Macronix will present their approach—very high temperature in a very short time— this month at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) from December 10 to 12 in San Francisco. This is the forum for presenting breakthroughs in semiconductor and electronic device technology. Lue observed that in coming up with the approach, his team would not be able to lay claim to any new physics principle. "We could have done this ten years ago." He said it took merely a leap of imagination into a different "regime." For their upcoming IEEE presentation, they said they propose and demonstrate a novel self-healing flash, where a high temperature (>800°C), and short time annealing are generated by a built-in heater. "We discover that a BE-SONOS charge-trapping NAND Flash device can be quickly annealed within a few milliseconds," they said. Their presentation is titled "Radically Extending the Cycling Endurance of Flash Memory (to > 100M Cycles) by Using Built-in Thermal Annealing to Self-heal the Stress-Induced Damage." The authors are H.-T. Lue, P.-Y. Du, C.-P. Chen, W.-C. Chen, C.-C. Hsieh, Y.-H. Hsiao, Y.-H. Shih, and C.-Y. Lu.

[Raja Bose]

anmol, MSFT marketing has to ensure that consumers see the Surface Pro in the same comparison context shown in that pic. Problem is with every tech blogger and their mother braying away about its being an iPad competitor is going to condition the consumer mindset in the wrong way unless tackled decisively.

Mortullah, something to watch out for over next 1.5-2 years is whether Android gets squeezed in tablets.

SaiKollah, actually touch+kb+trackpad combo is the future (maybe trackpad will go the way of trackball)...it works extremely well imo and is more natural than touch-only or the typical kb-mouse-only setup that we have been using for the past 30 years.

[SaiK]

graphics and text grabs and ms office suite itself takes the hell outta mouse and pointing needs., and the reason my thoughts were based on. another thing is snipping tool i like.. hard to do on the touchpad, but easy using a mouse.

[Anujan]

But when it comes to strategy behind Surface, it is quite clear that all Microsoft wants to do is to encourage likes of HP Acer Dell to make better products.

What makes it "quite clear" hainji? Ballmer himself has said he would like to sell a few million surfaces. Yes they will have a side effect of forcing their partners to come up with good devices, but it will also take a bite from their market share and add to Mickey's bottom line. So all is not as benign as it seems

M$ has three things going for it. Intel's roadmap looks good, and they have a fire under their musharraf now to step up their game. Already they have no parts in the mobile space (well yes they do, but a total of 100 people bought that phone) and Dell has announced arm-based servers soon. FB is reportedly exploring datacenters on ARM and if that succeeds, expect everyone else to follow. Intel is best when someone scares the sh1t out of them (anyone remember cyrix, transmeta and opteron?). In a year to two years time, Intel products will be competitive in terms of performance and battery life. M$ will reap that reward.

The second thing M$ has going for it, is that they understand developers. They were (probably still are) the biggest company on earth which made, sold, trained and fostered developers. The monkeyboy dance might be funny, but developers are the heart of any software company. Pre-iphunwa, the argument against buying a mac used to be "but it doesnt have all these programs that I want to run". They made Visual studio, had top notch APIs, worked on gaming, had microsoft certification training, had university outreach ... the list goes on and on.

The last thing is that they understand the corporate market. M$ makes a ton of money from corporate (probably a majority) and their support for fleetwide management, tracking, deployment and myriad services like exchange make it a fantastic corp device. They need to figure out a way to deliver their products and services in a more efficient way, and they are making progress in cloud services.

That gives them a 3 year window to get their game in order, shape up and compete. If they miss this window, they become a dinosaur. If they dont, they will force Fruitco and Chacha to compete harder and it would be good for all of us: For 300$ I can buy a top notch phone with Cellular radio, wifi, GPS, email, maps, browser and several times more powerful than the computer this talib installed slackware on to learn C programming. Life is good, because competition is good.

[anmol]

anmol, MSFT marketing has to ensure that consumers see the Surface Pro in the same comparison context shown in that pic. Problem is with every tech blogger and their mother braying away about its being an iPad competitor is going to condition the consumer mindset in the wrong way unless tackled decisively.

Mortullah, something to watch out for over next 1.5-2 years is whether Android gets squeezed in tablets.

SaiKollah, actually touch+kb+trackpad combo is the future (maybe trackpad will go the way of trackball)...it works extremely well imo and is more natural than touch-only or the typical kb-mouse-only setup that we have been using for the past 30 years.

100% correct. But I am 10000% sure that it would be something like this :-

"Though its better than Air in almost every way, windows have more apps than mac etc etc... but its thicker/heavier and have lower ppi than ipad so it sucks. Buy Air and an iPad instead" - Josh Toplosky/MG Siegler/Walt Mossberg

graphics and text grabs and ms office suite itself takes the hell outta mouse and pointing needs., and the reason my thoughts were based on. another thing is snipping tool i like.. hard to do on the touchpad, but easy using a mouse.

Sirji see digitizer in action.. (starts from 1:14)

[Anujan]

anmol, MSFT marketing has to ensure that consumers see the Surface Pro in the same comparison context shown in that pic. Problem is with every tech blogger and their mother braying away about its being an iPad competitor is going to condition the consumer mindset in the wrong way unless tackled decisively.

Step 1: Established player in market sells you a spade. People are happy with the spade. Most people are gardeners and spend most of their time gardening. Spade is a pretty useful device.
Step 2: Upstart makes a spoon, tells people it is lighter, cheaper, can fit into your pocket and is shiny (instead of dull and rusted like a spade). Spoons are now sexy, everyone wants a spoon! Justin beiber has a spoon!
Step 3: Upstart sells millions of spoons with a 2x markup. Even with a 2x markup, it is cheaper than the spade. People buy spoons by the millions! Everyone is jealous of the upstart and want a piece of the spoon market to get all the profits.
Step 4: Established player makes a better spade and advertises that it can be used as spoon too!! Oprah winfrey poses with a cup of tea and a spade and says how easy it was to scoop up the sugar using a spade (customers can see a spoon in her pocket though)
Step 5: Reviewers the world over try to stir their coffee with a spade, break their cup. The spade is heavy to lift! It does not fit inside your pocket! Is too costly! Is awkward to hold when you feed medicine to your toddler!
Step 6: Fanboys of the established player compare the spade with the biggest silver spoon sold out there and argue that the spade is cheaper! They tell you that the spade is light if you work out at the gym and get some biceps. They talk about the beautiful craftsmanship of the wooden handle.
Step 7: To rub insult on injury, a new company which has never made spoons or spade starts making a spork. It doesnt look sexy, but it can be used as a spoon and a fork. Plus it has a detachable handle and you can color it any way you want. Fanboys of upstart complain the spork doesnt look sexy. Fanboys of established player complain that the spork cannot be colored in every color because some colors dont stick on to the spork.
Step 8: People try stirring their coffee with new-spade, fail and continue to buy spoon and spork by the millions.
Step 9: Meanwhile, hipsters the world over are gardening, trying to scoop up mud with a spoon and getting carpal tunnel syndrome and sore hands. Fanboys of the spoon company argue why they dont need a spade at all, but look ridiculous while scooping up mud using a spoon. The spade company berates people who are gardening and tell them they should all be drinking tea instead. They shorten the handle of the spade and make it more expensive and piss off all the gardeners. They tell you the new-spade is a new category of device between a spoon and a spade and will be useful for new tasks like scooping moderate amounts of mud into your coffee.
Step 10: Ordinary people like yours truly, has a old trusty spade. Owns 2 different spoons and 3 different sporks and is living life happily.

[Raja Bose]

But when it comes to strategy behind Surface, it is quite clear that all Microsoft wants to do is to encourage likes of HP Acer Dell to make better products.

What makes it "quite clear" hainji? Ballmer himself has said he would like to sell a few million surfaces. Yes they will have a side effect of forcing their partners to come up with good devices, but it will also take a bite from their market share and add to Mickey's bottom line. So all is not as benign as it seems

Exactly. Ballmer made it pretty clear publicly when he told shareholders some moons ago that Mickey is gonna be a "Devices & Services" company so they are in it to make money off their own devices. In fact I think Chacha will also come out of the closet and go vertical at some point instead of its current wishy-washy public stance of claiming that Nexus products' primary goal is to "encourage" Android partners to make better products. Nobody spends all that money solely for welfare of the community, even ones with deep pockets like Mickey and Chacha.

[anmol]

What makes it "quite clear" hainji? Ballmer himself has said he would like to sell a few million surfaces. Yes they will have a side effect of forcing their partners to come up with good devices, but it will also take a bite from their market share and add to Mickey's bottom line. So all is not as benign as it seems

Because the way they priced Surface.. they are entering market 3-4 years late with fraction of apps and still thicker and lower ppi than iPad. If they REALLY wanted to sell it, they would be literally giving away it at loss or at cost price preloaded with full Office. (and make money back through store sales like they do with Xbox).

I agree 100% with the rest.

[Raja Bose]

Awesome! Unfortunately the spork is in danger in that category of utensils coz the spade is dug in too deep and so is the spoon (former in terms of captive user base and latter is terms of captive mindset) and even though spork is not the core business of the sporkmaker, without it consumer may not be able to pick up and eat the special organic produce from the Herr sporkmaker if Herr spademaker and Herr spoonmaker decide to be nasty.

[Mort Walker]

Bose babu,

Chacha is trying to go vertical with their Play Store, but until MOTO becomes really completely independent and is away from commitments to cretins like VZW, we won't see MOTO phones and tablets that are exclusive to Chacha.

Surface RT and Surface Pro will go the way of the Kin and Zune, which Micky spent billions on developing and marketing, as it is destined to failure. Sales are dismal at best on the Surface RT. I liked the Surface RT I used, but the soft keyboard cover for $120 is very cheaply made. Wash your hands before using it since its a dirt magnet. I can only imagine using it in desh on the train and after a single trip it would be completely unusable. I've already trashed 2 magnetic covers on the iPad in the last 2 years. 3000 Km on Indian Railways = 1 iPad cover.

[Raja Bose]

In massa, device makers are slaves to carriers. It is unlikely that is gonna change soon. MOTO can always terminate its contracts with VZW, Chacha has deep enuff pockets and enuff lawyers to make it happen. But I doubt they will do that.

[SaiK]

Except for the fruit is what I thought.. fruit prices are fixed by fruit people and not by mandi.

[Mort Walker]

In massa, device makers are slaves to carriers. It is unlikely that is gonna change soon. MOTO can always terminate its contracts with VZW, Chacha has deep enuff pockets and enuff lawyers to make it happen. But I doubt they will do that.

It might happen, but its at least 2 years off. Lets see how the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 does. There still isn't a 3G/4G version of the Nexus 10 yet and maybe we'll get one in 2013. Rumor is that Sony will get to do the next Nexus phone.

[Vayutuvan]

...10: [/b] Ordinary people like yours truly, has a old trusty spade. Owns 2 different spoons and 3 different sporks and is living life happily.

Nice . BTW, some beards don't like the old trusty spade as the handle keeps breaking and mud accumulates leading to periodic cleaning of the spade with a power hose. So they do not use the trusty spade but go back to a spade designed by trusty old beards which doesn't have a HANDLE. This spade can be used either as a spade, spoon, fork, spork, sfork, or all of them at the same time and is great for gardening baagh-e-aams spread all over the world as opposed to the baagh-e-khaas of the upstart and established.

[Raja Bose]

It might happen, but its at least 2 years off. Lets see how the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 does. There still isn't a 3G/4G version of the Nexus 10 yet and maybe we'll get one in 2013. Rumor is that Sony will get to do the next Nexus phone.

It wont happen if the current course of the industry continues so it doesn't matter if we wait 2 yrs or 4 yrs. What is required is a disruption in fundamentals in massa telecom consumer market. Nexus 4 or 10 doing well or not means nothing in this case.

[Mort Walker]

RB,


Well...Right now we have Google selling phones from their Play Store and rumor has it MSFT will sell the Lumia 920 from their store unlocked for $450. Apple is now selling the GSM iPhone 5 unlocked, but at exorbitant prices. If Google, Apple and Microsoft sell their phones unlocked on a consistent basis at reasonable prices, I think it would begin to push device makers away from telco carriers.

Google has the Nexus 4 for $299 and $349 and it has been selling out, but we don't know the numbers yet. Have you heard anything yet?

[SaiK]

every darn guy in desh wants an apple 5. where da phuck will i go?

[Anujan]

Still the no 1 place that customers buy phones from is a wireless carrier store. On top of that the carriers can twist chaddis by randomly not approving devices (VZW and NFC on galaxy nexus) not approving software ityadi. Till that is changed, everyone is at the mercy of the carriers.

I think things will change only through disruption. Like dish network offerring satellite WiFi and voice calling over that or something (I don't specifically mean satellite WiFi but something along those lines).

[Raja Bose]

Mort mian, its not about the devices, its about the plans. As a mango Joe sixpack who just wants his fb and teetar fix what incentive do I have today to spend $400-700 upfront to buy an unlocked phone??

[negi]

Saik mama 32 GB unlocked iPhone 5 in USA is cheaper than 16 GB version in India, how about that ? You guys might be gareeb but there are enough fat cats here in desh to justify that kind of premium on phones.

[anmol]

interesting:

Windows 8 Thunders Past Mac OS X on Steam

With all the bad news about Windows 8 these days, this should help put things in perspective: After just four weeks in the market, there are already more people on the popular Steam video game service using Windows 8 than Mac OS X.

Steam has been available on Mac OS X for over two and a half years.

What’s interesting to me is how differently Steam’s Gabe Newell has treated Mac OS X and Windows 8, both of which offered closed app store platforms that ostensibly compete with his own service. Back in 2010, when Valve launched Steam for OS X, Newell noted that Steam was “transitioning from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service” and that “customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients.” But when Microsoft aped Apple’s app store strategy, Newell went apoplectic, describing Windows 8 as a “catastrophe.”

Looks like its OS X that’s the catastrophe, Gabe.

According to Steam’s usage statistics, Windows 8 is already in use by almost 5 percent of Steam users. Mac OS X, meanwhile, despite the two and a half year head start, is in use by only about 3.3 percent of users. (Windows 7 is of course number one with about 77 percent usage.)

Two questions arise from this data. One, why would Steam even bother supporting the Mac, which is clearly even more of an also-ran when it comes to games. Even Linux could garner that kind of usage share. But don’t believe me: Even Steam thinks so, as it’s porting Steam to Linux!

And two, what does all this say about Gabe Newell’s ability to make good decisions? Coupled with Valve’s inability to deliver the long-awaited “Half-Life 2: Episode Three”—or, as we might call it, “the new Duke Nukem Forever”—it’s pretty clear the real problem here isn’t Windows 8. It’s Gabe Newell.

Hey, Gabe. Rather than wasting time and resources on silly dead-ends like Mac OS X and Linux, and on dissing your actual Windows 8-using customers, how about getting back to basics and finishing the job?

[Mort Walker]

Mort mian, its not about the devices, its about the plans. As a mango Joe sixpack who just wants his fb and teetar fix what incentive do I have today to spend $400-700 upfront to buy an unlocked phone??

True, but I hope the manufacturers do sell more unlocked devices to make them popular. If the job market continues to be bad more people will think about the cost of their cell phone plans.

[Anujan]

What is the point of the article apart from fanboyism?

The same statistics reveal 8% on vista and 10% on XP. By the same logic steam should pull windows 8 support and work on vista and XP support.

If windows 8 is marginally better than vista and XP and if the 18% on vista and XP choose to upgrade to windows 8, it will have 23% usage.

What does windows 8 team want for being better than vista and XP? A cookie and a pat on the back?

[Mort Walker]

XP will be supported for another 500 days by MSFT. After that if big corporate customers complain, MSFT will continue to support it. Windows 8 will soon be forgotten faster than Vista.

[prahaar]

Martenji, have you tried your hands at ASHA? It does all what you asked at affordable price points.

[anmol]

What is the point of the article apart from fanboyism?

The same statistics reveal 8% on vista and 10% on XP. By the same logic steam should pull windows 8 support and work on vista and XP support.

If windows 8 is marginally better than vista and XP and if the 18% on vista and XP choose to upgrade to windows 8, it will have 23% usage.

What does windows 8 team want for being better than vista and XP? A cookie and a pat on the back?

Point is 5% of Steam's base(four/five million users) within four weeks.

Obviously that excludes Windows RT users who bought Surface, it also exclude all the clovertrail or core based tablets too(who would use those for games). Also most of the laptops with somewhat decent hardware have 1024x768 resolution..

So close to all these people have installed/upgraded to Windows 8.

p.s.: Speaking of fanboysim, all those stories from verge/engadget etc about Windows 8 not doing as well as Microsoft had expected were quoting thurrot's following article:-

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windo ... -go-around

So he is certainly no John Gruber.

[ramana]

What is Steam and why is it important to know about?

[ramana]

Mort and RB, Thanks for the tip on the SIM card. I got a SIM card from the family and charged it with Rs 1000. Used my Samsung Eternity which was unlocked. Was able to talk to US and all that. It was so cheap that using US phone service is a rip off.

Why are basic phones so cheap in India? Everyone including the maid had simple phones: Rs 899 to Rs 1500! And used for incoming calls mostly.

[Anujan]

Ramana hi

Many moons ago the software company valve has the following problem. They couldn't upgrade their games and that would disconnect users. For example if you had counter strike installed and played online against other players, you would get disconnected if you forgot to upgrade. So valve created steam. A way of distributing software patches and upgrades.

Then they had a better idea. Why not distribute games themselves through steam? People could install steam client and then buy games from steam. Think of Mac/iPhone app store but started before Mac and iPhone app store.

Then they had a better idea. Why not match up people on steam based on their game skills and interest? Why not recommend games to people based on what their friends play a lot? Think of a Facebook / amazon recommendation for games.

So steam is an app store, content distribution and social network for gamers. The takleef that steam founder has with windows 8 is that now M$ wants to be the sole content distributor for windows 8. So valve cannot take a cut of games sold through steam. So the founder wrote an article "windows 8 is bad for gamers and game developers"

As an aside, steam also displays interesting statistics: like what video card its gamers are using, what OS they run and so on .... Which has prompted an article which proclaims:

BOSITIVE NEUJ!!! 5% of gamers on steam use windows 8 so windows 8 is taking the world by storm!!
AOA! Founder of steam says windows 8 is bad for games? Windows 8 has captured 5% of gamer user base and hence needs international recognition and money.

My point is, I don't see the point of the article. A significant number of people running vista and XP are going to upgrade to windows 8 and they apparently are 18% of steam users.

[Mort Walker]

Ramana,

Many of the cheap Androids have a non-upgradeable OS, or rather, the manufacturers are not working upgrading past Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It works and if you want more, upgrade your phone. Further, most of the cheap phones in India are fixed to a single frequency (on the really low end) or are dual-band (900/1800 MHz). A GSM phone which works worldwide needs quad band 850/900/1800/1900 MHz. These phones in India generally cost considerably more.
US phone service is a rip off. You are paying a high price to get subsidized devices. If you don't get newer phones, you continue to pay the high price. In India if you want a high end phone, you go pay Rs. 40K and get one, but your service is still cheap depending on what you decide to do. In the long run you pay less. Some telco carriers like Verizon will give you a fairly high-end phone for very little or no cost because you will end up paying nearly $100 per line per month. For some they think its worth it, for most it is not. The business model in the US is not going to change anytime soon, but the good news is, when your contract ends, don't renew or get a subsidized phone and go pre-paid.

[nachiket]

Why are basic phones so cheap in India? Everyone including the maid had simple phones: Rs 899 to Rs 1500! And used for incoming calls mostly.

Actually I don't see much difference in the prices of phones. The cheap phones you talk about are little different from an ancient Nokia 3310 with a color screen added. They are available cheap or even free in massaland as well.

As for the high end phones, a cursory look at Amazon shows that the unlocked Sammy GS3 priced at $558, while on Flipkart it is priced at Rs. 35k. So a difference of about 4k considering $1 = Rs.55. And before Appil started selling unlocked versions of iPhunwa 5 at $650, Amazon and co. were selling it for $800+. Which is above Rs. 40k. Again, not very different from its actual price in India. Don't know if Appil sells it unlocked in India themselves. In any case, Appil is hardly bothered by how many people buy it in India. India is an insignificant market for them. So the price may not come down.

There will always be some difference in the prices of other high end phones due to import/customs/excise duties in India.

[Raja Bose]

Marten mullah, some of the Asha phones from GB are pretty good and does what you listed and are optimized for users who don't have a data plan apart from having good localized features, apps and content. Problem with Android is that its UX sucks on low end hardware which is one reason why GB managed to grab back some of the marketshare in India after the initial Android surge from Sammy/local manufacturers in low end phones.

[Raja Bose]

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