[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181020113629/https://shop.puri...
That would explain why "the device will be entirely assembled by (Siemens) Gigaset factories in Germany."
So it's a whitelabel phone. I seem to be misunderstanding the excitement :\
Google did to phones what MS did to PC's. Dominated the OS market making it non-competitive. That is very bad for many reasons.
We need viable options and alternatives to iOS and Android.
Hardware is less exciting to me than the Software, and the Operating systems. Competition there would be nice
Thank you, I'm glad someone is saying it. Smartphone hardware matured several years ago, where even a $10 Walmart prepaid phone is good enough for everything except mobile gaming. It's long past time we had more than iOS and Android to choose from as a first class citizen. I realize there will likely never be a competitive third party OS on mobile (even a behemoth like Microsoft gave up just when their mobile OS was getting really, really good), but I'd settle for just the ability to buy an affordable device that can run whatever I want to put on it.
With this device, the PinePhone, and (holding my nose) the Librem 5, we now have enough choices on the hardware side to give the OS devs incentive to make their offerings polished enough to be daily drivers.
Reminds me of that guy who used an iPad for a wall mounted information panel (weather, transport time, traffic conditions, some other stuff). Pretty cool.
If you're interested in alternative software better invest in Librem 5, or if it's too expensive for you get a PinePhone and start hacking.
The same way one can claim that knockdown kit assemblers in Rwanda, Ghana, Pakistan and etc are "manufacturers"
HTC was the last big OEM amicable to co-branding or white label terms. They tried to build an own brand, and failed miserably because they failed to perceive how marketing works in the West. Maybe they will get more agreeable again.
Somehow it doesn't seem possible to prevent HTC from building one smartphone and sell it either themselves or via another brand as an android phone, while at the same time selling the same design (screen peripherals etc) with some minor chages, maybe a slightly different SoC, to someone who wants to sell a phone with a different OS? How exactly would the license forbid it?
Obviously google owns the license and can probably unilaterally revoke it for anything they see as unpleasant (such as building OEM phones that run linux, instead of just TVs that do?) - but is this really expressed explicitly in their agreement? How?
It is the other way around companies that produce Google Android phones (with play store) are banned from producing anything Android not based on Googles stack. Amazon had to find out the hard way that basing your OS on Android makes it hard to find a manufacturer.
Of course this is not globally true. Various countries already informed Google just what they thought of that kind of licensing abuse. That led to Google carving out new licensing regions for every lawsuit and outright boycotting Turkey when they mandated the same treatment as the EU.
Or is there a
From my knowledge of the phone industry, and one of out past client's venture into it, the minimal viable budget for a cellphone project is $1M these days on the low side.
- MOQs of all truly essential assemblies are huge: high-end PCBs, custom made camera modules, custom cut LCD/OLED cells, antenna-body integrated assemblies
- RnD is long and torturous, even without Android atrocity: RF-tuning for high perf wireless, tiny high density PCBs development, lots of prototyping for bodywork and LCD assemblies
- SCM challenges are monumental even for factories in South China: constant shortages and high lead times of speciality passives, time spent waiting for parts, while burning money, logistics to and from module integrators...
Smartphones are becoming like jet engines: while parts count in general go down per unit of functionality, and they become simpler for non-IC parts of the design, very few can make them competitively as the supply chain gets longer, and 3rd parties are now taking bigger and bigger cuts with each year.