This past weekend, at the annual Penguicon sci-fi and Open Source Software convention held in Troy, MI, Eric S. Raymond gave a talk about Android. Specifically, he spoke a little about its origins, how it has and will continue to affect the smartphone market, and a bit about its overall future.
Be afraid, Jobs. Be very afraid.
One particular point that stuck out was the fact that both Qualcomm and NVIDIA, the two largest producers of Android-based chipsets, have released to manufacturers their own version of complete System On Chip (SOC) solutions for Android phones. These are single-chips that contain everything needed for phone functionality (Processor, RAM, graphics, radio hardware, etc). Coupled with a reference circuit board design and a sweet spot for smaller-sized LCD panels, Eric believes that manufacturers (mostly in China. But who isn’t, really?) will be able to crank out large volumes of ridiculously inexpensive devices very quickly.
The SOC design and smaller screen size that would be expected out of these phones will put manufacturing costs far below anything that is currently available, even lower than the current crop of dumbphones and feature phones, which tend to run between free and $50-100 on contract. Add in a little bit of zero-cost OS seasoning, and things get pretty tasty in short order.
So what does this all mean?
The largest implication in this is for the third-world markets. The lack of infrastructure in many of these countries means that they live and breathe on the cell networks. In many cases, a cell phone is the only means of electronic communication available, either through calls or SMS messages. Updating to a smartphone suddenly puts real computing power and Internet connectivity into places where it was previously unfeasible (or prohibitively expensive) to do so.
Additionally, and much more important for the US market, these devices may signal the beginning of the end for long-term contracts and subsidized phones with ridiculous retail prices, as well as carrier-locking of devices. This holds particularly true if these devices are planned to support the LTE technology currently being rolled out by Verizon and AT&T, and possibly T-Mobile, as the differentiation between carriers becomes thinner and thinner.
Overall, if these devices start rolling out as Mr. Raymond predicts (he’s been very solidly correct in all of his Android predictions so far, sometimes to within a couple of weeks on certain things), it may very well spell the beginning of a new era in smartphone usage, and probably cell phone and mobile device usage in general.
The future does indeed look interesting
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