Lower Cost Android and (Lumia) WinPhone 8 Smartphones ...
>> Low priced Windows 8 phones sticks it to the low end Android market
John Sol Cruz
TechnoBloom
29 May 2013
technobloom.com
The companies may be heavily focused on the high end market with the Galaxy S4, HTC One, and Xperia Z, but Android’s largest market is still the low end sector. This is evidenced by the fact that so Gingerbread is still the number one variant of Android in the market. This is because low end Android smartphones usually have only up to Gingerbread. In this low end sector, a new threat is rising in the form of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.
Let’s face it, not everyone can buy a high end smartphone. For the most part, people settle down for the lower end just to be able to experience a little bit of what others are experiencing through their top end smartphones. Of course, they have to settle with a slower phone and lower specs, but it offers a pretty close experience, even if they miss out on the higher end apps in the market.
Android has grown to require so much in hardware that older phones and low end phones could never hope to get the best out of versions like Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich. This is the main reason why Android is fragmented: the lower end market.
On the other hand, Microsoft is making a name for itself in the lower end market with Nokia’s low end phones. As you may understand, Windows Phone 8 doesn’t have a very high system requirement. As a matter of fact, even the high end Windows Phone 8 devices features specs that are way behind Android’s high end, but both devices operate just as smoothly.
Thanks to Nokia, Windows’ low end market is thriving. Their low end phones feature the same Windows 8 experience all around. While being much lower in price compared to high end devices, low end Windows Phone 8 smartphones do not sacrifice operating system performance in their builds. While low end devices may have lower end cameras, batteries, and build material, it does have the same performance driven specs such as dual core processors and at least 512 MB of RAM.
This means that regardless of the features of the device, the smartphone manages to run the latest OS and the most recent patches that Microsoft has to offer. In a way, even though Windows Phone 8 is available through different OEMs, it manages to keep its fragmentation at minimum.
Of course, this is all moot if Windows Phone 8 as a platform completely fails. After all, it is still struggling in the high end market, and its apps database still leaves a lot to be desired. But having a lot of phones running high end software on a low budget smartphone will help it keep its grip at least in the lower end market. ###
- Eric - |
