The £40 Smartphone has arrived
It’s called the t-mobile Rapport. The price is, by any measure, remarkable. A customer bought this device for us to evaluate, brand new, for £40+VAT from Asda direct.
The big thing for us is that proper smartphones at these kinds of prices are a gamechanger for a product like Truckcom. Just a few years ago, our customers were rolling out Truckcom on Windows mobile devices that retailed for £300.
Truckcom passed the cost-benefit test back then easily, including this high device cost. But if phones are now available now for such a small fraction of that earlier cost, the case for adopting a system like Truckcom becomes overwhelming. And a side benefit is that operators can be a little more relaxed about thefts and damage – which although rare, were a worry in our early years when devices were so much more expensive.
But then again, will such a cheap device do the job? We’ve done some tests, and our verdict is … yes it, probably can. We need to be a bit careful at this stage, of course, because we don’t have many hours of real operational use – but initial tests are positive.
Underneath the t-mobile branding, it’s actually made by a company in the far east called Huawei. Probably the reason it’s so cheap is that Huawei, based in China, are competing against premium brands like Samsung (South Korea) and HTC (Taiwan) – and they correctly think that western consumers expect a Chinese phone to be cheaper.
Like several other products over the years (and certainly HTC did a lot of this when it was starting out) it appears under different names on different networks – on Vodafone it is sold as the “Vodafone Smart” and on Orange as the “Orange Stockholm” – but the branding is just a gloss on the basic phone, the Huawei U8160, which is pretty much the same in each case.
If you bought one of these for general use expecting it to be as good as a far more expensive device, you’d probably be disappointed. There are several compromises the makers have made to keep the price low. But here’s the thing – to run Truckcom on a phone, you don’t need a powerful, expensive device. Truckcom doesn’t place high demands on the phone it runs on. So from a Truckcom point of view, it’s pretty much just as good as a more expensive device.
The Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times” seems appropriate on two levels. These are genuinely interesting times in the Smartphone market – but it’s partly because we’re living in interesting (in the bad sense of the proverb) times economically that we see prices falling like this.
