Five years? You can buy smart phones for 30$ in shenzhen electronic malls today. I don't know your threshold for cheap, but considering feature phones sit at 25 to 20 in the same places.. The future is now :-)
>>>You can buy smart phones for 30$ in shenzhen electronic malls today.
1) That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people. When Shenzen hardware is sourced by global brands, they usually have a generous markup where that "$30" quickly disappears.
2) How long do they last? "Oh, but they're cheap. If it breaks in 3 months, just buy another!" No. People just don't want to go through possibly losing data and having hardware just suddenly drop dead on them.
So, yeah. I'll go with the guy who said five years. That's for stuff that won't drop dead in three months.
> That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people.
Ah, yes, if only some smart people could invent some kind of global network for people to buy things remotely, and created some site where you could order these things. They could call it, for example, Ali Baba.
Still Mars. Unknown companies, unknown quality, unknown warranties (as in mostly non-existent). And sending it back to China to exchange a defective unit? Suddenly that $30 isn't.
A wide range of these products are available at reasonable markups via a variety of Amazon Marketplace resellers.
That's how I got my first one. But since then I've started ordering direct from Alibaba/Aliexpress and for many products the savings are large enough to "self insure" and still be worth it with a good margin.
Go up to ~$100 and the choice of smartphones becomes even more diverse. Quality would probably be a bit better too. This is with no contract, unlocked everything (chances are it's also Mediatek based, which means no bootloader locking AFAIK), and you get all the features like dual SIM, removable battery and expandable storage that most of the big-name manufacturers don't want you to have.
Edit: actually, it looks like $50 is already enough to get a pretty good entry-level Android phone; look up the Jiayu F1.
