“Affordable” Gets A New Meaning With Android Go

There is a major difference between products that are “cheap” and “affordable”. A cheap product costs you much less money in the short term but might end up taking a lot more cash out of your pocket in the long run – when it breaks, for example, and doesn’t get any of the post-sales services and support a more expensive one from an established brand will get you. When it comes to smartphones, going with the “cheap” option will usually get you a subpar product – it’s a much better idea to invest in an “affordable” handset offered by a well-known brand that will not only last longer but will usually work better in the long run, where a cheap one will usually end up freezing even during something as easy as your Betway Nigeria registration.

Until recently, “affordable” meant “around $200” for most established phone manufacturers. But then Google came forth with an initiative to give the word a new meaning. It has created Android Oreo: Go Edition, a new operating system built upon the latest edition of its mobile OS but with lower-end devices in mind: ones with fewer processor cores, less RAM, and less internal storage. Now “affordable” means a much lower price tag – of course, this depends a lot on individual manufacturers.

This year, several major phone makers have presented – some even released – their own take on the Android Go phone. Usually, this means dual-core or quad-core CPUs, 1GB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage placed under the hood of a handset with a 4.5″ or 5″ screen, a decent camera, and an up-to-date operating system. Since it’s not the OS that consumes most of the phone’s hardware resources – it’s the apps – Google released a series of them built specifically to run on lower-end hardware, and some third-party manufacturers did the same. The OS itself is built to occupy less of these phones’ limited storage space, leaving more of it for the users’ own apps, music, photos, and such.

Let’s take a look at some of the handsets running Android Go. One of the most affordable such handsets is Blackview’s A20, a phone with a 5.5″ screen with an 18:9 aspect ratio, a massive 3,000 mAh battery good for 10 hours of browsing the web or 20 hours of listening to music, a quad-core 1.3GHz CPU optimized to work great with Android Go, and 8GB of internal storage. A perfect first smartphone that you can buy for as low as $60. And the phone is surprisingly good, according to Forbes Magazine contributor Ben Sin.

Other manufacturers are also preparing their take on the affordable handset. Asus is preparing to launch its ZenFone Live L1, Huawei has a “Y series” planned, Samsung will launch the J2 Core, and Nokia will soon release its Nokia 2 handset (it will probably be a bit smarter than the existing Nokia 1). And all of them are expected to cost somewhere around – or significantly less than – $100, giving “affordable” a whole new meaning.