This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.
There are a bunch of subbrands but there are also a lot of genuine small Android phone companies, especially in China.
Some of these serve some interesting niches that might now disappear due to this DRAM supply issue, e.g. Unihertz for extra small phones or CAT for extra durable worksite phones.
Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. This could just mean that the unnecessary churn dies down a bit, and companies taking advantage of it have to find a new line of business.
> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months.
I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot afford it!
Even in the mid-end: If you buy a phone which you find to be decent, but affordable, and are not out for chasing the latest gimmick - there is no reason it would not last you 6 or 8 years easily - before applications start assuming the presence of better hardware, or a newer Android version than you have etc. Naturally you will have to protect it from physical damage, and maybe replace a battery at some point.
Because the phones stop working well? I write part of a post, open another tab to go look up some information, come back to the post and what I've written is gone, because the memory got dumped. That's the reality of using an old cheap phone.
And would you consider yourself representative of the phone-buying public in general?
My desktop PC is from 2008 but I'd never consider this to represent anything like common usage. In fact it's so unusual that I get to point it out in posts like this.
This comment makes no sense to me. I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi. I buy a new one roughly every two years. Each new phone has a better screen, camera, CPU/GPU, charging, and sometimes more RAM/storage.
But it had 4k 60fps video, optical image stabilisation, a "super retina display" etc five generations ago. The specs have kept improving, but it's not a quantum leap in performance.
The same applies at the low end, the grand parent comment even agrees.
You buy a new phone every two years, it comes with a camera, a cpu, a gpu, a host of sensors. Same as phones did two years ago, and ten years before that.
I don’t use my current smart phone in any ways that are different to the iMate PDA2K I had twenty years so.
> You buy a new phone every two years, it comes with a camera, a cpu, a gpu, a host of sensors. Same as phones did two years ago, and ten years before that.
I am confused by this comment. I said that each time I buy a new low-end mobile phone, there are large improvements in the quality of screen, camera, cpu/gpu, and other sensors. Sure, I have had a 4k camera on a low-end mobile for about 10 years now, but the quality (light/colour) of photos and videos has improved dramatically.
How often does your browser freeze up when you open a webpage? How often does your phone browser dump its memory when you switch to another tab and then switch back? Eg if you were writing a post and opened another tab to go check some fact then the post in the original tab gets deleted.
Because that's what happens if you use an old cheap phone in the modern day.
I even had a phone that would occasionally just crash when on a heavy website and the onscreen keyboard popped up. That was not at all infuriating!!! Especially when it would crash when I try to refine a Google search.
your comment makes also no sense to me, I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi since 6 years, and change it only when it's dead or when I can't run my apps (I'm afraid mine won't last 2 years more). Before this I kept my first smartphone (iphone 3GS) for 10.
