Phones with Google's Android are being baked and sent to the market one after the other. This open-source mobile operating system has been more than a blessing to many phone makers, who had the expertise in making the hardware, but didn't really have a polished OS with enhanced functionality to run them on. The best part about Android is that it's free for any manufacturer to take and slap on their devices. Also, there isn't a stringent hardware checklist to follow, unlike Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.
This enables companies to roll out cost-effective smartphones that are within the reach of many. Not to say that they have to compromise on certain features to get that price down, and the degradation in the performance of these when compared to the flagship Android phones is noticeable. But considering the lackluster interface, laggy performance and fragmented availability of apps on phones that were sold before Android was born, things definitely have gotten better.
Some of the phones under that fall in these categories are:
- LG Optimus P500
- Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8
- Samsung Galaxy 3 i5801
- HTC wildfire
- Motorola Quench XT3
- Dell XCD35
Most of these 'cheaper phones' running on android OS have these basic features:
- Touchscreen Phones: The interfaces are intuitive, the touch response is accurate. Or we can say, touchscreens are really in these phones.
- They are 3.5G ready (i.e. HSDPA compatible). This is good since we're witnessing private operators roll out 3G services one by one. Other forms of connectivity i.e. Wi-fi, Bluetooth and data cable are present as well. Lastly, all have a GPS chip that is necessary for extremely nifty apps like Google Maps.
- These have capacitive screens that are optimized to be used with fingers.
- They also happen to have accelerometers for automatic rotation of the content on the screen according to the way you hold it.
Apart from other basic features like, they all can make a call..!! Have the ability to store your data and can also be used to send SMS/MMS..!!
