A $50 Phone is Ambani's Weapon To Dominate India Telecom Market

Reliance Industries has asked local suppliers to ramp up production capacity in India so they can make as many as 200 million smartphones over the next two years, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, a potentially enormous boost for the country's technology ambitions and a warning shot to rivals such as Xiaomi. From a report: India's most valuable company is in talks with domestic assemblers to make a version of its Jio phone that would run on Google's Android and cost about 4,000 rupees ($54), said the people, asking not to be identified since the plans are private. The inexpensive phones will be marketed with low-cost wireless plans from Reliance Jio, the parent company's carrier, they said. Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani is aiming to remake the country's smartphone industry much like he did in wireless services, where his aggressive prices and simple plans quickly made him the dominant force. The billionaire is also aligning himself with the Indian government's plans to build more domestic manufacturing, a possible boost for local assemblers like Dixon Technologies India, Lava International and Karbonn Mobiles.

Mobile platform play

[mveloso]

Most excellent! He can subsidize the phone with his plans and other services, and become the dominant e-platform in India for a decade.

What happened to the Open Source Community?

[jellomizer]

Back in the old days of the 1980's and 1990's people started to make their Own PC's they used off the shelf components to make them. They shared what they did and some people decided to make a business making White Box PC's. Over time, electronic manufactures began to cater for these, thus became very easy for anyone to build their own PC. This however didn't stop companies from making their own.

Still over a decade of the the modern "Smart Phone" we do not have White Box Phones that we can build and cust

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[Scoth]

Miniaturization and integration, mostly. Early PCs were large and modular and space was mostly not a problem. This meant that cards could be big and there was plenty of space for expansion slots, as well has having flexibility on case size and shape. Large cases could have oodles of slots, small ones could have a couple flipped on their side with risers, etc.

Phones generally have much more limited dimensions (needs to be approximately slab-ish, possibly flip-phoneish) and have much stricter requirements for

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[jellomizer]

Granted I don't expect it to be as open as a PC. However one should be able to get a motherboard with say a snapdragon CPU and be able to plug/solder in your own battery, and screen, as well some additional sensors if you want.

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[Graymalkin]

Open source basebands aren't likely to be something you ever see. The radios in phones need to conform to transmission regulations. No phone is going to get FCC (or equivalent) certification if any unlicensed asshole can tweak settings in the radio baseband.

You overclocking your PC or hacking your Roomba isn't going to block your neighbor's 911 call about the numbness in their left arm and chest pains. Fucking around with your cell phone's radio can.

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[r2kordmaa]

Modular phones have been tried, frankly it don't work. You don't have space to spare and you really need the economies of scale to make the economics work. That means you are going to have to at the very least do your own electronics design, but you probably need all your components custom and maybe a custom SoC too. You don't need to be a giant conglomerate to do all that, you'll subcontract most of it anyway, but a one man garage shop isn't going to work.

Technotrash

[aglider]

Much more of it in 2 years and more... Thanks a lot.

I've used $50 phone for 2 years

[ghost.sk]

From 2017 to 2019 I've been using $50 phone as my daily driver (Android 6, 512MB ram, 4GB storage). I loved it because of the weight (100g). Normal software was terrible but tailor made software for it was quite usable. I made rss reader and browser for it and couple games. I even made 3D racing game that ran 50fps in JavaScript (via webview) so it's possible, here is recording of it: https://youtu.be/okg61OOFUdQ [youtu.be] $50 phone today is plenty fast but you need to develop software on it from the start and optim

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[backslashdot]

That's looks pretty good. I'm impressed, is the source code to that app available?

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[ghost.sk]

No but you can extract it from apk, it's not obfuscated

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[backslashdot]

I would definitely do the needful and eat butter chicken when it comes to that.

Jio is India's national Champion

[ghoul]

The BJP govt is adopting the China model. There has been an unwritten understanding shared with all tech firms - if you want to do business in India better partner with a local partner (of which Reliance is the most capable). Whether its Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tencent , Buffet or Softbank all are investing into Reliance. Apple still hasnt cracked so this is how Reliance will force them to fall in line.