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Android One Smartphones to Arrive In India VERY SOON, Priced at Less Than $170

By Shujaa Imran / August 18, 2014 / , Technology 1377

The range of Android One smartphones, which Google promised to be “cheap” Android smartphones available in emerging markets, may soon arrive in India for a price tag of around Rs. 10,000. But these smartphones may not be exactly what Google promised us they would be.androidone

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Back at Google’s previous I/O conference, the technology giant promised to bring much cheaper Android smartphones to emerging markets sometime this fall.

According to a recent report by India Today, these affordable Android One smartphones could be arriving into the subcontinent as early as next month, which, if goes as scheduled, will put the launch of Android One an entire month of the original schedule.

In India, the three device manufacturers that will produce these smartphones will be Micromax, Karbonn and Spice. According to Google, these smartphones will contain a vanilla Android version without any bloatware, then to be approved by Google for release.

Unfortunately though, it seems as local OEMs have disagreed the price tag announced by Google at I/O. The price announced by Google for the Android One range was to be somewhere around Rs. 6000 ($100), but OEMs might ship the smartphones with a price tag of Rs. 10,000 ($165). This change could drastically affect sales of the device range.

Also, some OEMs want to pre-load some of their applications on these smartphones, which goes against the whole purpose of the program. Micromax’s first smartphone is rumoured to have a 4.5″ screen, 960×540 resolution, Snapdragon 200 processor (likely to have Cortex A5 CPU and Adreno 203 GPU), dual-SIM, 5MP camera and a microSD slot.

These phones will most likely run a slimmed-down version of Android 4.4 KitKat, as Android 5.0 L isn’t likely to release anytime before November. Google did praise KitKat last year for working excellently on low-end devices, so the software should be a good fit for these devices.

Google should continue to expand the Android One program globally to cover more countries in the near future, producing more low-cost devices.

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Tagged as: Android One
  • Charles – The Great and Powerf

    Sounds like trash considering Windows Phone’s line up.