Cheap Phones - Are they a good deal?

I'm too lazy to locate attempts at materials lists, but that's the next stop for this sort of discussion. There are things we do know though.

The chips powering these phones are all going to come from the same manufacturers. There are only so many companies with the capability to make them. My phone is a Cherry Mobile which today costs maybe $100 new. I believe it has a Samsung chip in it. The glass is also the same as you'll see in phones which are much more expensive. I have put this thing through some big drops without breaking. Most of the rest of the components are fine with "good enough" as long as they're reliable for the typical consumer cycle of a cell phone.

This is exactly how I would build a P.C. as well. Maybe I wouldn't get the most optimized components to squeeze every bit of bit of performance possible for my gaming (I'm not a gamer) but the system would get the job done.

The cell phone industry is quite mature. Cell phones are a solved problem. I wouldn't buy a hybrid tablet here as that's an emerging field which the market leaders are only just now getting right.

Chip speeds have stalled. Moore's law is close to the end. Storage speeds are good enough because it's solid state (faster than a hard drive with spinning disks). The first spec I look at is the RAM. This is the most important component for deciding how your phone is going to perform for basic usage. 512mb is basically unusable as a smartphone. 2gb is where I would want to start, but 1gb will work.

From there it's all personal preferences. I don't use the camera. For my usage I don't even remember how much storage my phone has (16 GB I think) because I don't save much on it. I know I have plenty of space left after over a year and a half of usage. I don't play games. Most people only use a handful of apps and I'm the same.

 

Cherry Mobile doesn't manufacture phones. They go to a manufacturer which creates a line-up of phones for companies such as Cherry Mobile to choose from. For example, the same phone being sold as Cherry Mobile in the Philippines could also be sold as X model by another cell phone vendor in India. Cherry Mobile just slaps their branding on the phone the order. How else are they are able to release so many different models being a small Philippines vendor?

These manufacturers are probably using much the same components and even the same factories to build some of these "cheap" phones as the more expensive phones are using.

One benefit you get from this is that the specs on these phones move quite fast as opposed to other vendors which do control their manufacturing and have a much slower release schedule.

To me, these things are just PC's in a different form factor. If we are talking about PC's, "cheap" isn't very descriptive. You really need to be talking about exact components. Is the processor cheap? Is that a problem? What is its capabilities? Why do you need a faster one?

As with PC's, a faster and more expensive PC isn't necessarily better for you. It depends on what you use it for. And if you have specific uses, then you need to be specific on what components you need to add to get the functionality you need.

For example, if you are running heavy video / graphics, then a good video card is more important than the main processor and RAM because the graphic processing can get moved to the video card which may have its own processor and RAM.

Sure, there are varying levels of quality even from the same component manufacturers. Server chips from Intel are generally a lot more expensive than desktop chips from Intel because servers go through a heavier load and need to be more reliable.

For most of us, we just need to find out where that bar of "good enough" is and aim for that. You'll probably find that you don't need to dish out over $300 for it. This is especially the case for someone who currently doesn't own a smart phone and won't be a power user.

In this particular case, free is a great option. But as a secondary option, the phones sold by the local vendors are pretty good.

 

I like a screen on a phone with fairly high definition approaching 300 points per inch as it makes text sharper, is easier to read make pictures look nice. I will watch youtube videos on my phone if I want to show someone something or I am bored. I don't need a 4k resolution screen on my phone. The higher the resolution of the phone screen means you need a more powerful graphics processing unit which uses more power, more power means more energy usage, more energy usage means less hours of battery life and or a larger battery is needed. More energy usage also leads to a phone that can get hot enough you can make a grilled cheese sandwich on it. Top of the line processors aren't that expensive, the really hi definition screens are expensive, I bet they have a crap load of them rejected. Ram is not that expensive but Apple charges about $100 extra for every step up in ram. Development cost according to Samsung is not that expensive, their cost, according to Samsung is in advertising.

Sony, Samsung, LG, and people in the past complained about Apple, do make phones that have middle of the road specs, 720P screens which are pretty sharp on 5 inch and under phones, the graphics processor doesn't need to be fantastic to drive the screen, the CPU of quad core 1.2 Ghz or greater along with the graphics processor doesn't need that much power and these phones generally have good battery life. These are bread and butter phones, probably where most of the company profit comes from. These more simple phones perform well if they are optimized. I think they build the flagship phones because it gets name recognition. It comes to mind that companies used to race their cars because if you win on Sunday, you sell on Monday.

The middle of the road phones are sunk cost, the development is done, the production line running for years, the cost of components that might have been top of the line 10 years ago are now cheap. It doesn't pay to go rock bottom anymore and use a twisted nemonic screen when an in plane switching screen will increase the cost of the phone by less than $1. Different techniques have come along like OGS which stands for one glass solution which means that the screen is bonded directly to the glass which makes even a mediocre screen look brighter and more vibrant at a cheap price point.

My sis-in-law uses a Samsung Galaxy S. Not S2, S3 though S7. She is on her third battery. She paid about $400 for the phone long ago as it was the then flagship. Over time the operating system has been upgraded to Android Gingerbread 2.3.6. It has a very clear super amoled screen is only about 6mm thick, has a battery life of about 4 days and will do just about anything a new phone will outside of hooking up a flash drive through OTG. The ancient svr 544 graphics processor plays video just fine, in fact the movie Inception came preloaded on the phone. Older Android operating systems up to Ice Crème Sandwich can use flash player. LG still puts Android Honeycomb on tablets. The latest and greatest isn't always necessarily better and may require you to give up more than money. Taking it to the next level, the next level is not always up. It is cool to have bragging rights though.

 

Since I had my cell phone stolen while in Lapu-lapu I only carry the cheaper cell phones. I wouldn't spend over 5000 pesos on a phone just in case the phone decides it needs a new home. Basic spec's for the phone would be something like quad core, 8 GB memory, LTE cap. , 4.5 " screen, of course with android.

 

I probably should have made this more clear, but (at least in my mind) I was referring to the featured phones. That means, you're probably talking around $175+ for a new release or maybe as low as $125+ for a featured phone which is about to be discontinued to make way for the next batch of releases.

The $50 phones with 512 MB of RAM are junk and are barely smart phones because you can't run much on them. They also have crap displays which break easily.

As for specific components, such as the processor, you get a wide field to choose from. You don't have to look at just Cherry Mobile. You could also look at MyPhone and the long list of other players in the space. Between all of them you'll probably find something which comes close to what you are looking for.

It's a game of bottlenecks. If you only have enough RAM to run your operating system then your system is going to fall down no matter what processor you have. Next you need to have enough RAM to run a typical list of applications. Once you have plenty of RAM to run a reasonable list of applications, then you start looking at the processor. As you have pointed out, there are a lot of phones on the shelf which don't have enough RAM to run a typical app load (and many don't have enough storage either). But each of these phones probably have a "good enough" processor for basic usage. To recap, on low end ($50) phones you don't have enough RAM and you don't have enough storage even for basic usage, but the processor is probably okay. If I'm buying a high end phone, I probably don't even have to look at RAM. On a low end phone, RAM is your bottleneck and the first spec to look at.

The hardware manufacturers are always releasing updated hardware. It would make sense that they work with the top brands, but there are so many now that these brands aren't the only customers. How often does Apple release a new batch of phones? Once a year? A couple times a year? The component manufacturers are still improving and building cheaper in between and the smaller brands can take advantage of this by continually releasing phones with different configurations and features. Cherry Mobile adds new phones like every month. That doesn't mean a new top of the line Cherry Mobile will be better than a year+ old Iphone, but this faster release schedule is their only other play other than being super cheap.

I'm not trying to compare $50 phones to $600 phones. I think the better comparison would be more like a top end Cherry Mobile to a budget release from a top brand. Maybe you find that you can get different specs (you want quirky features that Samsung is too good to add) and a bit cheaper than an alternative from bigger brands.

That said, I'm running on an old POS laptop, a mobile connection which is capped at 1GB / day of bandwidth (including up and down) and my $160 Cherry Mobile (I have had it for probably a year and a half). Some people would shoot themselves faced with these constraints. I have learned to get by on a budget.

 

Believe it or not, one of the two Myphone or Starmobile made a phone with RCA jacks so you could mirror the screen on a TV. Really low tech but it worked on low tech TV also.

My comment about my Sis-in-law's phone was that it ran on Gingerbread 2.3.6 and it does practically anything a new phone can do that you really need done. The svr544 GPU is rarely found in bargain basement phones any longer. Her phone runs fast on 1 GB ram. My point is that the newer operating systems and the programs specifically written for them are what requires more ram. Kitkat was revolutionary in that it was a light operating system that didn't need a huge amount of ram to operate. Windows phone is very light also. Try opening up 15 webpages on your phone and see how it acts, if you have a powerful new phone have the bread and cheese ready for grilling the sandwiches.

 

Apparently the browser on a phone works differently than it does on a desktop. I have 100+ tabs open on my phone. I guess I sort of use open tabs like bookmarks.

These tabs don't continue running in the background like they do on a desktop though.

Edit: I use Chrome for both the Phone and the desktop.