$20 Handset Will be Available Before the Year Ends
ARM believes that smartphones will soon be affordable to everybody. Sources said the company continues on scaling the process technology and combines the development of small/power efficient CPU cores to ensure that even the cheapest mobile devices are called smartphones.
Covering ARM's Tech Day, Anand Tech, shared some data about how the smartphone market is growing daily. It said the growth of the smartphone industry is shifting from high-end devices to mid-range and then entry level devices.
By 2018, ARM expects more than a billion entry level smartphones to be released annually, which will be less than $150 as compared to the prices quoted today by the smartphone companies.
The factors that will drive the entry level devices are their performance and cost. ARM will introduce an entry level handset running an Android at a minimum price of $20 in the coming months.
The $20 smartphone will have a single core Cortex A5 processor and 2.5G wireless data along with sophisticated mobile computing like calls and text messages, social networks and the modern mobile Web.
Also, this smartphone won't be competing against the giant companies that are currently topping the market. But will definitely mention that the single Cortex A5 is faster than the ARM11 in the original iPhone priced at $599 in 2007.