ARM predicts $20 Android powered low-end smartphones this year

ARM predicts that a basic Android-powered smartphone will get significantly cheaper this year and that sales of those cheap devices will boom

By: Shane McGlaun | Business, Financial & Legal News | Posted: May 7, 2014 4:00 pm

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One of the challenges to get the next billion people online is that most of those people live in a country where incomes are significantly lower than they are in the US. The relative ease that many of us can come up with a few hundred dollars for a smartphone in the US is well out of the reach of many people in poorer developing nations.

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For that reason, many smartphone makers are concentrating on very cheap devices for developing nations. ARM says that in the next few months an Android-powered smartphone running a 1x Cortex-A5 processor will sell for only $20. That sells for about $33-$28 today.

ARM is also predicting a massive growth in the entry-level smartphone shipments over the next few years. By 2018, ARM predicts over a billion smartphones in the sub $150 will ship each year, about twice the number that ship today.

NEWS SOURCES:Anandtech.com