Google introduces $50 4G smartphone
globalvillagespace.com
globalvillagespace.com
"Reliance Jio will soon start selling an Android phone which they have called Jiophone next, and it will cost Rs. 3500... probably."
This is total spam. The title has nothing to do with the content of the article... The phone isn't introduced by Google, it's introduced by:
> Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, doing business as Jio
and guess what, the article is total speculation:
> As far as the pricing is concerned, JioPhone could be priced as low as INR 3499.
Emphasis on 'could be' added by me. It isn't released yet and apparently the author is just guessing what it could cost... based on what?
Besides, how is it surprising that this is subsidized? This device is network locked and handicapped.
Jio phones are totally handicapped. They don't even allow users to open a wifi hotspot because that would compete with their wireless routers. Maybe that's what they are 'collaborating with google' on.
This isn't news it's an advertisement.
What ever reasons(App ecosystem majorly) led Jio (An investor in KaiOS) to ditch KaiOS is applicable to all other manufacturers too, Especially if Google(another investor) partnering with them(Android Go? Subsidizing HW?).
This is classic PR, inventing a fake reason why a profitmaking move is somehow altruistic.
It works on many such as you because many such as you are steeped in the middle class world of $300 flagship phones every couple years and were unaware that decent sub $50 phones have been around for years.
Even a pretty nice phone like a Google pixel or Google pixel 2 can be had for about $100 used. They work great still and only have issues because of intentional choices by Google to prevent security updates. It's only a policy thing, no technical cause -- custom ROMs allow latest Android to be used just fine.
I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.
PS: I relied on the $40 moto G for a few years without issues except "kind of slow". I upgraded to a used Google pixel off eBay for $100 a few years ago. I'm a software engineer and use plenty of popular apps. The forced upgrade treadmill is totally artificial. Just look at the specs on the Google pixel 2 vs pixel 5 sometime. No practical difference, just a bunch of marginal gimmicky stuff like 4 cameras, fingerprint readers that are on the screen instead of the back, etc.
Pretty much nailed it. How many big companies are out there, which are not taking advantage of their partial monopoly or huge influence?
Money always wins. Capitalism encourages for endless growth and profits.
The 300m people Jio is hoping to migrate from 2G to 4G with this phone will now be able to use essential apps such as those needed for Covid vaccination registration, job searches and digital payments. Hence this is hugely empowering.
I find your comment a little disheartening, sorry. You could buy on a black friday sale, or eBay - but so what? The target segment for this phone makes less than $300 a month.
I find your lack of effort "a little disheartening" as you say. It's like you don't want to believe it's cheap and easy to get a decent new phone for very little.
I went to the trouble of doing what you were too lazy to do. I don't have time to do more pointless googling but Verizon prepaid sells a no contract $55 smartphone today. You can likely get better deals if you shop around at all, or are in a cheaper market than the USA. I'm not going to engage with you further, do your own work. https://www.verizon.com/smartphones/orbic-maui-prepaid/?cmp=...
The cheapest phone in India with an HD display comes in at around 25% higher than what Jio phone will sell for (if the $50 turns out to be true).
Disclosure: I did work with Jio (as a consultant) on software for their older JioPhone, running a version of Firefox OS. It sold about 70 million units.
I still use my 10-year old Samsung Galaxy 2 phone (mainly as mp3 player and spare phone when I want to take a more expendable one).
Flash it with cyanogen and you have a basic smartphone that still feels snappy.
https://cyanogenmodroms.com/i9100/
My main phone is a 5 year old Galaxy S7 and I would very likely buy another as my main phone if this one was lost.
Have you recently seen cities in "third world" countries like Uganda or Kenya? They look pretty modern. I don't buy that access to information relies on a cheap spying and data collecting device there.
Well to actually talk about Google and ads, amazing how bored kids in Eastern Europe made fake news websites to earn Google ads revenue, not caring how it affects the people and the world.
Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
Both companies sell ads. Data they collect is used to target those ads. That is their market edge. It doesn’t even make sense for them to want to sell data to 3rd parties because it would diminish their ad-targeting advantage.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other reasons to be concerned, but the myth of Google or Facebook “selling your data” is just wrong.
These companies are in such a position, that they have so much data when selling it brings competitive disadvantage.
There is a competition going on from the control of the world, in terms of sophisticated A.I. development. This is where they are using their data. Ads are just little sidekick in the process anymore.
Also, they probably do everything with the data and a bit more than average data buyer would do.
The web is mostly only useful to a tiny percentage of the working class who have been somewhat able to get a successful formal education, and who go on to take up a spot as a privileged knowledge worker/labor aristocrat. For capitalist owners there is no toll-booth they cannot get past (through acquisitions/informational duopolies).
Today's education system is itself a traumatizing Hunger Games-esque competition (it was to me), and ends up debilitating and wounding most of the working class, convincing them that they are dumb and incapable [1], and most of all competitors to conquer. The public facing web you talk about ("all the worlds information") is actively hostile to beginners/learners, and is mainly designed to control the feedback from what today's dominant institutions/organizations are spouting out at us (it is far from the two way 'global village' McLuhan talked about).
I keep seeing access to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube touted as some sort of standard or benchmark for online knowledge equality, yet this narrative just serves as a self-justifying tool to remedy the survivorship guilt most labor aristocrats feel. As I wrote recently:
> It isn't access to Google search and Wikipedia that made the best scientists and engineers, it was access to commoditized knowledge which is enclosed, re-enclosed and then rented out in small amounts to the highest bidders (i.e. the so called 'prestigious' universities in the global north). In other words, it's held hostage behind corporate firewalls.
What we need is a distributed knowledge commons, as well as fully open-access scientific production systems. This means abolishing the IP regime and abolishing Silicon Valley. [2]
I see two of the highest leverage points for this being 1.) the Valueflo.ws vocabulary and system, which can help us rapidly replace today's corporatized siloed Enterprise Resource Planning software/systems, in favor of a fractal inter-organizational networks (similar to project Cybersyn in Chile under Allende [3]), and 2.) the holochain/ceptr (metacurrency project) framework, which has the potential to completely rewire/rearchitect the web using it's BitTorrent + Git + cryptography qualities [4] (keyword: agent-centric).
[1] Why I started my own Sudbury Valley school, https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2013/06/why-i-started-my-ow...
[2] Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[3] Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
[4] Reinventing Applications by Nicolas Luck https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
Your comment is insane dude. The knowledge commons is the public internet. Silicon Valley is just a place in California, why does it need to be abolished lol.
This is exactly how we ended up with QAnon, anti-vaxxers and people taking horse dewormer.
I'd argee with you ~15 years ago, but with the internet now being more or less dominated by companies who profit off "engagement" and are hawking any content (no matter how false or harmful) as long as they can get eyeballs to look at their ads I'm not sure it's that good of a thing.
Therein lies their motivation. Another data grab disguised as good deed. I long for the days when Google was benevolent (or at least the impression they were existed)
There is some room for different value judgements, but that's not the same as saying all choices are morally equal. Which I don't think you're proposing.
Ads, engagement, loot boxes, freemium upsells, pyramid schemes, fintech, issuing debt...
Smart money takes their profits. Retail investors are lucky to get some cheddar. Throngs of customers saddled with debt.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Doing otherwise is almost always is a violation of the law and shareholders would sue executives if done differently.
* 5.5-inch HD+, 720x1440
* Snapdragon 215 SoC
* up to 3GB of RAM
* 32GB storage
* 2500mAh battery
* Android 11 Go Edition
If those are indeed the specs, I'd call it a very good option for that price point.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/jiophone...
If you've got problems like choppiness or unresponsiveness, you should check if GPU hardware acceleration is enabled in the settings and if your GPU driver hasn't been blacklisted for known stability issues. Things like KVM should also be enabled of course, but I'm pretty sure you're warned about that if you don't have it enabled.
AMD and Intel both had a mobile Linux GPU driver blacklisted for hardware acceleration for a while, which made the emulator on my old laptop switch back to software based rendering, which was slow as molasses for obvious reasons.
I've also learned not to run Android emulators with less than 3GiB of RAM anymore because that's the minimum a mobile OS requires these days, apparently. Also give the emulator at least 2 cores and run everything from an SSD, bbecause those are the specs the OS expects.
If you don't like Google's emulator, I've also found Android x86 in Virtualbox to be reasonably stable after messing with the config for a bit. You need to mess around with it to get ADB debugging to work and to get the screen in a phone-like resolution, and you need to follow a guide to get Google's APIs on there, but after that it's pretty much good to go as far as basic Android dev goes. It's much more configurable in terms of changing specs and it doesn't seem to mind the lack of GPU acceleration as much.
There, fixed the title.
This has little to nothing to do with helping people in the Global South, it is a calculated investment by Google/Alphabet.
If you are working class and you live in the global south today, your life is often already a living hell because of this [1]. This flavor of hell will slowly 'trickle up' to the north as more and more spaces of the commons are plundered through imperialism, increasing inequality while more and more members of the working class become alienated.
Of course this is nothing new. This is one of my favorite scenes in Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg
I am against any system that aims to make knowledge artificially scarce and monopolizes parts of our collective human inheritance (all of humanity's scientific and technological discoveries). I am for new systems which respect both our world's 1) actual material scarcity (natural resources, human labor, etc.) and 2) it's immaterial abundance (any knowledge/resources that can be replicated by (digital) technology).
[1] Against Rentier Capitalism: David Graeber, Michael Hudson & Guy Standing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rlIXAUGans&t=944s
https://9to5google.com/2021/08/30/google-assistant-kaios-tex...
I am confused as to what exactly the novelty of a $50 smartphone is at this point.
Just another data point I suppose, to support the drumbeat that smartphones are very cheap now, and are the ubiquitous default computing device for most people by now.
You can't even keep your kids off smartphones. Their friends will just give them last year's model they were gonna toss in the trash and they'll use it on wifi. Teachers don't even try to keep the kids off the phones in class. When I subbed in a classroom last spring, I once had a kid come up to me to ask me something, and then bury herself in phone distraction before I could even answer, and then act annoyed and surprised that I interrupted her to answer the question she herself had gone out of her way to pose. I was baffled. This was an extreme case but not by that much.
The kids are downright addicted, for the benefit of big internet shareholders, as big tobacco once did.
When I was that age I was often very bored. This inspired me to find ways to use my brain, to read, write, draw.
That we is gone now. Private boredom has been co-opted and is now owned by big internet for their benefit.
We had TV to plague us in the same way then of course. But at least TV was less engaging and less omnipresent. As soon as you left the home your mind was free.
There are the sidewalk philosophers who say that "things always change, every generation complains of kids these days" but this is a facile and ignorant retort. For 10,000 years technological change has happened yes, but at a much slower rate. What changes today in half a generation, took several generations for most of human history. Parents had a fighting chance to hand down knowledge of how to navigate the world, and to figure out over several generations how best to adapt oneself to new technologies.
It might soon become the easiest way to get a LineageOS compatible half-decent phone.
I too hope it gets LineageOS (and if I remember well... The ROM scene is quite active in India. After all, thanks to their scene my old Xiaomi is still alive and running!).
Most valued? Maybe. Most valuable? Definitely not. Energy is largely undervalued today.
This sort of thing aye, giantg2
> Due to its budget-friendly price, the device will target the lower segment of buyers that cannot afford expensive phones. This means that phone access will be provided to more people as the smartphone connects the users to the rest of the world.
> This also means that companies like Facebook and Google will have greater access to the data of people living in India as more and more become dependent on technology. Most of the businesses of the world now operate on the ‘data economy’ where the statistics and data tells them what product the user is more inclined towards. Now the world’s most valuable resource is data, not oil.
If this is the official spiel, then I'm aghast!
The only thing it's enabling is another human rights disrespecting corporation.
also the price doesn't seem particularly cheap, I can buy Cubot Note 7 here in Czechia with 2y EU warranty for 70$ incl. all fees without any subsidies from any carrier like Jio, also 5.5" display, also 2/16, also 4G, Android 10
I'm sure I could buy better configuration for less than 50$
It's not google, it is Jio
Actually, if you're a surveillance capitalist, it's a very clever move to focus on a markets with users that can't afford to vote with their wallet.
Before any falsehoods get mentioned, in the poorest countries you'd better believe there's always a guy ready to make a micro business reflashing things for the technologically unskilled for pennies. If the demand exists.
I'd say: less cynically, this whole thing paints a new target for the Chinese to chase with cut throat prices even lower. Meanwhile, as pragmatists, these Chinese manufacturers aren't categorically hesitant to make reflashing hard. Because they're not best friends with US companies to begin with to care.