Today a very interesting article appeared in the online edition of the publication Fortune, article followed by others some which essentially outlines the same ideas presented in the first. The main idea in these articles sounds something like this: Broadcomm a developed a new platform for smartphones, the platform that will allow smartphone manufacturers to sell devices at very low prices. According to those who wrote these articles, next year we will witness an invasion of Android smartphones that will have final prices of $75-$100 and worldwide over half a billion mobile phones will be sold.
To be honest, $75-$100 Android smartphones with weak to mediocre hardware will be hugely successful. Why? Very simple: most people want the "best possible" phones at the lowest possible prices, and smartphones like this will sell very well in all corners of the world. At the moment, there is fierce competition on the smartphone market and manufacturers register billions of dollars in sales annually, but here we are only talking about high-end smartphones. In the low-end segment there is not much competition, and the one that exists is not complete because Apple is not present there.
Why is Apple not present in the low-end segment? Because iPhones have very high prices and a $75-$100 iPhone, final price, seems like a dream far too good to be true. Android terminal manufacturers have no way to win against those from Apple in the high-end segment, so with the appearance of this low-end chip there will be very cheap semi-potent smartphones for the masses.
What will an invasion of such cheap smartphones lead to? Well, first of all the operators will be left without the "power" they had when selling the terminals at a subsidized price; secondly, we will see more and more poor quality smartphones on the market; thirdly, developers will start to hate Android even more due to fragmentation; fourthly, Android will probably end up being more used than Symbian.
Will Apple have anything to lose in this fight? Since Apple does not compete in this segment, it is clear that it has nothing to lose. The iPod Touch is not a smartphone, nor does it have such low prices. Will Apple ever want to compete in this segment? I doubt that Apple wants to make low-end smartphones, if it wanted to do this we would already have them on the market.
So, 2011 will be the year of Android, but I hope it's not just a bubble.
