Actor Senthil plays a strange character called Anna Veri Kannaiyan in the Tamil movie Boys. He lives on a footpath and several times a day sends out his assistant to different temples to get prasadam in a big container off which he lives. One day when the new assistant threatens that he will strike it on his own, Senthil pulls out his trump card that he calls his data base. A 365-day schedule of what food can one get from what temple at what time on what day. Brandishing the notebook in his assistant’s face he says, ‘information is wealth’. At the launch of Android One, when Sundar Pichai, the second most popular man in IITs after Satya Nadella and the Vice President at Google in charge of Android and Chrome operating systems, said ‘knowledge is a game changer’, I had a hearty laugh remembering Senthil. That is because, Google is in effect the Anna Veri Kannaiyan of the tech world. Or at least it wants to be and Android One is a product of that ambition.
Android One was first announced at the I/O, Google’s developers conference in June when 10 minutes into the keynote presentation Pichai announced Google’s ambition to take Android to the next five billion people in the world who still don’t have access to smartphones and through it to the Internet. ‘When I go back home to India… it is exciting to see the impact that phones have on people’s lives, but it is disappointing that less than 10 per cent of the population have access to smartphones,’ he said. Google’s answer to changing that was Android One. And this month, at an event in India, Pichai finally announced the three phones that ship under the Android One banner.
The Micromax Canvas A1 which sells for `6,499, the Karbonn Sparkle V at `6,399 and the Spice Dream Uno at `6,299 are those three phones. Manufactured by Indian companies, all the three phones may look different aesthetically but have the same internals. They all boast of a 4.5-inch FWVGA display with a resolution of 850x480, a Mediatek 1.3-GHz quad-core processors, 1GB of RAM with a 1700mAh battery. They all have a 5-megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel ‘selfie’ shooter on the front. For now, all three phones come with 8GB of microSD cards free to support the 4GB of internal memory through the microSD slot that can support cards up to 32GB.There are plenty of other smartphones on the market like the Moto E and the Redmi 1S at the same price points with better internals but they all lack one aspect that Android One phones can boast of. The later phones have Google’s blessings. The components are all handpicked by Google and the software they run is near-stock Android, which is how the Google God envisioned it to run, with almost no modifications from the manufacturers. They will also get software updates from the mothership itself, including the L release of the Android coming in the next few months. They get support for 17 Indian languages out of the box, Indian newspaper and magazines on the Newsstand and get free app updates and downloads when using an Airtel SIM card. And Google is also promising that soon Android One users will be able to download YouTube videos while on WiFi.
To put it simply, the Android One program is Google’s attempt to make very affordable phones that are not a pain to use. As you go down the price ladder, Android phones tend to get horrible. They often run very very old versions of the operating system, they are clunky, and in many cases are nothing more than feature phones with an Android label on them. This along with other problems like poor 3G connectivity and prohibitive data costs have restricted the usage of smartphones in India to a small percentage of the population. While it sounds grand to hear that the smartphone market in the country grew an astonishing 186 per cent in the last year alone, we have to remember that more than 80 per cent of devices being sold in India right now are feature phones. Not counting the feature phones being sold under smartphone label.
The Android One program wants to change it by being more accessible, and by giving users a consistent experience. In the words of Caesar Sengupta, the Vice President of Google’s Product Management team, the Android One is like ‘ISI quality mark for phones’. Google is also extending the program to other partners like HTC and Lenovo, and will soon take it to other developing markets in South East Asia and South America. With increasing competition from other platforms like Mozilla and Windows Phone that are launching phones at rock bottom prices, Google is also confident that it can launch more Android phones at both cheaper and higher prices in the future.
While Sengupta states that ‘(Google) never thinks about monetisation when starting a project’, it is obvious that the more people use Internet, the more data Google gets, and the more ads it serves the more money it makes. While it sounds like a win-win situation for both the consumers and for Google, this also means Google, a company that never utters the privacy word, becomes the information overlord of the world. As Farooq Butt, a Vice President at WiTricity, says on Twitter, ‘Apple’s exhaust is data. Google’s fuel is data’.
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