Today, Google has launched their newest line of mobile phones called Android One. Dubbed as the “phone with a philosophy”, Android One aims to deliver a powerful, Google-designed system that can easily be afforded by those who have yet to experience a smartphone – a population which numbers to over five billion around the globe.
Keeping in mind countries wherein good hardware means exorbitantly higher price points, Google has partnered with several manufacturers including Acer, Alcatel, Asus, HTC, Karbonn, Lava, Lenovo, Mediatek, Cromax, Panasonic, Spice, and Xolo in creating a line of phones that can smoothly run on the latest Android OS even while keeping costs low.
Sundar Pichai, SVP for Android, Chrome & Apps, explained how it works in an interview by the BBC:
“We provide our OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] a menu, effectively. They can choose the CPU [central processing unit], the GPU [graphics processing unit], the storage, the type of battery, the type of camera. It really saves them a lot of effort in terms of identifying the right hardware [and] doing all the testing you need to do to get the software to run on this hardware. We tune it, we work out the bugs… we keep it secure, we update it, and so on.”
At the bare minimum, Android One phones will come with a front and a rear camera, dual sim card slots, a micro sim card slot, an all-day battery, and best of all, a quad-core processor.
This means that Android One can and will be tailored to the needs of the five billion future users that Google has yet to tap.
With several new and old mobile device contenders trying for low budget, high-quality phones, Google’s latest initiative seems to have a bright future. After its initial launch in India, Android One will expand to other countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines.
Photos courtesy of googleblog.blogspot.com and www.android.com/one/
