Is Android the Future of Feature Phones?

Feature phones are about to exist reborn.

The $270 Kyocera Dura XE for AT&T looks and works merely like flip phones have washed for 15 years or so. It flips open, has relatively stock-still functions, and no app store. But nether the hood in that location'due south a strange amount of power for an easy-to-employ flip phone: a Snapdragon 210 processor, 1GB of RAM...and Android.

Motorola i886 (Sprint) The Android characteristic phone movement isn't new, but at present might be its time. The strategy has been used to implement button-to-talk earlier in 2022's Motorola i886 (right), and to run music apps on 2022's ZTE Chorus. More recently, Sonim built a high-end corporate Android characteristic telephone in the XP5. Simply a big wave may come soon because Android-uniform chipsets are much cheaper than they used to exist, and the wireless carriers are demanding a truly non-feature phone-compatible feature: VoLTE.

Voice over LTE is huge for the U.Due south. wireless carriers. LTE is much more efficient than older cellular technologies, and switching customers to VoLTE lets carriers shift their spectrum away from older technologies and suit more customers. VoLTE, which can include "high-definition" vocalization and rich calling services such as IM and video calling, will eventually supplant standard voice calling on all 4 major networks, executives have said at various times.

And VoLTE is definitely the future. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon take all launched VoLTE, and Dart CEO Marcelo Claure says his carrier intends to exercise so besides.

Kyocera says that for the DuraXE, AT&T wanted its "enhanced button-to-talk" adequacy and voice-over-LTE, and those aren't available on the older feature phone operating systems. I've been unable to notice any feature phones that support VoLTE, even globally.

Kyocera isn't the only company working on this. I've heard from several other manufacturers, who want to remain unnamed, that they're working on Android-based feature phones.

Feature Phones Have a Future
The CTIA, a wireless trade arrangement, estimates that well-nigh 22 percent of the 355 meg total "connections" in the U.Southward. are feature or messaging phones—that's 78 million devices. That number jibes with what I've heard informally from Verizon, where various people have told me 20-30 million dumbphones remain on their network.

Freetel Musashi Ian Chapman-Banks, the CEO of Japanese manufacturer Freetel, sees an ongoing market for flip phones. His solution to consumers demanding feature telephone form factors, for at present, is the Musashi (left), a powerful dual-flip Android phone with a $249 list price.

"Nosotros make feature phones; fifty-fifty in Japan, they buy feature phones ... if you reach a certain age, you lot don't want to change, and why should you?"

Kyocera's protected by the Dura XE's corporate focus, which lets information technology sell its rugged feature telephone for $270 - far more than, say, the $20 Blu is charging for its Tank Two phone. Mediatek supplies many of the chipsets for those existing feature phones, and company president C.J. Hsieh says it's nevertheless tough to supply Android-compatible hardware, which gets down to the prices well-nigh people expect from feature phones.

"Information technology'due south still non piece of cake to move [characteristic phone customers] to the Android platform. They don't like it; it'due south also complicated, and the cost is a trivial big because of the footprint of the Android platform," he said.

There may be a way to slim down Android, Mediatek's general manager Finbarr Moynihan points out: get rid of the Google services, which add a lot of weight to the packet.

"In that location are very different cost structures for software and retentiveness. Closing that gap isn't so like shooting fish in a barrel because it's non just Android, it'due south Android plus GMS," he said.

Moynihan and Hsieh also point out that in that location'southward still a very large market for super-inexpensive, 2G basic phones in the developing world, fifty-fifty if U.Due south. and Japanese carriers are starting to push button hard to get away from 2G devices.

Can Apps Fit In?

The main danger here is a missed opportunity.

While the manufacturers I've spoken to are working with Google to get some sort of stamp of approving for their feature phones, I haven't heard about any sort of consortium or coordination to allow for consistent interfaces or app compatibility across manufacturers' devices.

LiMo Phone from 2008 There's precedent for that, too. Back in 2008, a agglomeration of manufacturers tried to create a Linux-based middleware platform for semi-smartphones chosen LiMo (correct), which ended upwardly being folded into the Tizen OS. Of course, LiMo and Tizen both failed every bit standards (Tizen concluded up becoming a Samsung-just projection), which doesn't speak well for mobile Os standards formed by consortia. Peradventure there are only too many cooks in the kitchen that way.

Some sort of consistency in the platform would allow for third-party developers to create apps and games for these budding characteristic phone platforms. Don't necessarily retrieve of Candy Trounce here; retrieve of corporate GPS, asset tracking, line-of-concern, and fleet-tracking apps for business feature phones, for instance. The need for those kinds of apps has been driving longtime rugged feature phone maker Sonim towards smartphones.

A common platform would also make the phones cheaper, more reliable, and quicker to come up to market, as they'd be able to run common code for "apps" like VoLTE, push-to-talk, and carriers' account management apps.

Over the holidays, I had a long conversation with my in-laws about how they desire to upgrade their Verizon flip phones, but don't have a lot of available options. (They need world phones, and Verizon has only two world characteristic phones out right now.) From what I'g hearing, they—and the millions of other feature phone users who may need new phones, but want quality phones that aren't large touchscreen slabs—may merely take a year or so to wait.

We'll observe out more than at Mobile World Congress, the big mobile industry trade show starting on Feb. 22.