"Reliance Jio will soon start selling an Android phone which they have called Jiophone next, and it will cost Rs. 3500... probably."
This is total spam. The title has nothing to do with the content of the article... The phone isn't introduced by Google, it's introduced by:
> Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, doing business as Jio
and guess what, the article is total speculation:
> As far as the pricing is concerned, JioPhone could be priced as low as INR 3499.
Emphasis on 'could be' added by me. It isn't released yet and apparently the author is just guessing what it could cost... based on what?
Besides, how is it surprising that this is subsidized? This device is network locked and handicapped.
Jio phones are totally handicapped. They don't even allow users to open a wifi hotspot because that would compete with their wireless routers. Maybe that's what they are 'collaborating with google' on.
The main takeaway for me is RIP kaiOS i.e. Proprietary successor of Firefox OS because earlier JioPhones ran them which surprisingly led KaiOS to get the 3rd largest market share in mobile OS.
What ever reasons(App ecosystem majorly) led Jio (An investor in KaiOS) to ditch KaiOS is applicable to all other manufacturers too, Especially if Google(another investor) partnering with them(Android Go? Subsidizing HW?).
I can't express my contempt for the people shitting on this. Of course google is a for-profit company, and they do this because it will help them make money. But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information. And yet you see people whining about ads in this thread.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that a $50 smartphone introduced in 2021 is in no way anything special or novel. Cheaper usable smartphones have been around for years. The billions are not getting anything they haven't had for years.
This is classic PR, inventing a fake reason why a profitmaking move is somehow altruistic.
It works on many such as you because many such as you are steeped in the middle class world of $300 flagship phones every couple years and were unaware that decent sub $50 phones have been around for years.
Even a pretty nice phone like a Google pixel or Google pixel 2 can be had for about $100 used. They work great still and only have issues because of intentional choices by Google to prevent security updates. It's only a policy thing, no technical cause -- custom ROMs allow latest Android to be used just fine.
I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.
PS: I relied on the $40 moto G for a few years without issues except "kind of slow". I upgraded to a used Google pixel off eBay for $100 a few years ago. I'm a software engineer and use plenty of popular apps. The forced upgrade treadmill is totally artificial. Just look at the specs on the Google pixel 2 vs pixel 5 sometime. No practical difference, just a bunch of marginal gimmicky stuff like 4 cameras, fingerprint readers that are on the screen instead of the back, etc.
Wholeheartedly agree — I’ve owned a pixel one for the entire lifecycle of the phone. The problem with the pixel one right now is that they no longer get security updates — any tips with regard to that?
MotoG at $40 off contract was probably a clearance sale, and not available in millions of units. I can't think of an HD screen phone at this price point - can you post some links?
The 300m people Jio is hoping to migrate from 2G to 4G with this phone will now be able to use essential apps such as those needed for Covid vaccination registration, job searches and digital payments. Hence this is hugely empowering.
I find your comment a little disheartening, sorry. You could buy on a black friday sale, or eBay - but so what? The target segment for this phone makes less than $300 a month.
Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free and great service (like Google Maps) at the exact same time I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data. This is exactly what makes it so fraught. People aren't objecting to cheap phones, they're objecting to the continued commercialization and manipulation of human experience.
> I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data
Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
Both companies sell ads. Data they collect is used to target those ads. That is their market edge. It doesn’t even make sense for them to want to sell data to 3rd parties because it would diminish their ad-targeting advantage.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other reasons to be concerned, but the myth of Google or Facebook “selling your data” is just wrong.
Poor people don’t deserve to have their rights stripped just for being poor. Yes, this will help them, but it’s also important to be transparent about the motivations of Google; they’re not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, at all.
Are usable smartphones at the ~$50 level all that hard to find in India? If they're already available, then this move by Google won't make information more accessible, but it will give them more data & ad revenue. From a business standpoint that's fine, but it's not virtuous and doesn't improve the status quo.
Meh. I agree that it's probably doing enough good for the world that Google's ulterior motives are worth ignoring, for the time being. But this level of cynicism and skepticism is absolutely warranted.
I wasn't and am not going to complain about "Boo, Google bad, ads bad", but I wonder if the promise of all the world's information in your hands have helped. Nowadays it seems misniformation has also been helped by the connected world, e.g. with Facebook groups basically helping^Wfacilitating the prosecution of Rohingya, not to mention the spread of Covid misinformation...
Well to actually talk about Google and ads, amazing how bored kids in Eastern Europe made fake news websites to earn Google ads revenue, not caring how it affects the people and the world.
what if people are actually better off not having 24/7 internet access in their pocket and all the new expectations that go along with it? i’d definitely like to return to that world given the chance
> But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information.
This is exactly how we ended up with QAnon, anti-vaxxers and people taking horse dewormer.
I'd argee with you ~15 years ago, but with the internet now being more or less dominated by companies who profit off "engagement" and are hawking any content (no matter how false or harmful) as long as they can get eyeballs to look at their ads I'm not sure it's that good of a thing.
> But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information.
The web is mostly only useful to a tiny percentage of the working class who have been somewhat able to get a successful formal education, and who go on to take up a spot as a privileged knowledge worker/labor aristocrat. For capitalist owners there is no toll-booth they cannot get past (through acquisitions/informational duopolies).
Today's education system is itself a traumatizing Hunger Games-esque competition (it was to me), and ends up debilitating and wounding most of the working class, convincing them that they are dumb and incapable [1], and most of all competitors to conquer. The public facing web you talk about ("all the worlds information") is actively hostile to beginners/learners, and is mainly designed to control the feedback from what today's dominant institutions/organizations are spouting out at us (it is far from the two way 'global village' McLuhan talked about).
I keep seeing access to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube touted as some sort of standard or benchmark for online knowledge equality, yet this narrative just serves as a self-justifying tool to remedy the survivorship guilt most labor aristocrats feel. As I wrote recently:
> It isn't access to Google search and Wikipedia that made the best scientists and engineers, it was access to commoditized knowledge which is enclosed, re-enclosed and then rented out in small amounts to the highest bidders (i.e. the so called 'prestigious' universities in the global north). In other words, it's held hostage behind corporate firewalls.
What we need is a distributed knowledge commons, as well as fully open-access scientific production systems. This means abolishing the IP regime and abolishing Silicon Valley. [2]
I see two of the highest leverage points for this being 1.) the Valueflo.ws vocabulary and system, which can help us rapidly replace today's corporatized siloed Enterprise Resource Planning software/systems, in favor of a fractal inter-organizational networks (similar to project Cybersyn in Chile under Allende [3]), and 2.) the holochain/ceptr (metacurrency project) framework, which has the potential to completely rewire/rearchitect the web using it's BitTorrent + Git + cryptography qualities [4] (keyword: agent-centric).
You talk about abolishing IP regime then talk about strong IP defending holochain. The irony! (Bitcoin is all that is needed btw).
Your comment is insane dude. The knowledge commons is the public internet. Silicon Valley is just a place in California, why does it need to be abolished lol.
Access to pics, movies, propaganda and distraction.
Have you recently seen cities in "third world" countries like Uganda or Kenya? They look pretty modern. I don't buy that access to information relies on a cheap spying and data collecting device there.
> This also means that companies like Facebook and Google will have greater access to the data of people living in India as more and more become dependent on technology.
Therein lies their motivation. Another data grab disguised as good deed. I long for the days when Google was benevolent (or at least the impression they were existed)
It could, I think many companies do choose the right thing over the profitable thing, at least sometimes. Obviously not all companies, and not everytime. If that caused sufficient lost profits, shareholders might band together to try and change the leadership of the company. I can't cite a specific instance of this happening, I think it's rare. I would be surprised if it hasn't happened though
For company it is impossible to be "benevolent" because companies are not humans. This entities are almost always obligated to maximize shareholder profits. Not fiends of anyone, does not have any causes or reasons to exist except to maximize profits.
Doing otherwise is almost always is a violation of the law and shareholders would sue executives if done differently.
My thoughts exactly to be honest. It's a mid-range phone which, from what I take, won't be crammed up with bloatware. I got a Nokia 5.something(forgot what it was) for my mom some time ago with pretty much identical specs and it was in the $200-ish range. It was like a year ago but I recon it's still in the 130-40$. I was really pleasantly surprised with how well it behaved. The bigger screen aside, in terms of experience it was pretty much identical to my old pixel 2, having used it for ~2 years at the time. It'd be awesome if that phone can deliver something similar for a third of the price.
There's built-in simulators with the android developer tools. Or are you looking to test how it would look/feel on an actual phone (which is a good idea as well)?
Google introduces $50 4G smartphone to enable billions of people to get spied on and to use black box Silicon Valley tech that will continue to plunder the commons and continue to commoditize science and technology*
There, fixed the title.
This has little to nothing to do with helping people in the Global South, it is a calculated investment by Google/Alphabet.
Yes, yet it doesn't identify the root cause of the rot of this current system though, which is the complete commoditization and monopolization of science and technology.
If you are working class and you live in the global south today, your life is often already a living hell because of this [1]. This flavor of hell will slowly 'trickle up' to the north as more and more spaces of the commons are plundered through imperialism, increasing inequality while more and more members of the working class become alienated.
Can we agree that MSGOOGLEAPPLE are defacto arms of governments? If the USGOV wasn't getting what they want from them, they would have been broken up a long time ago (antitrust). China would kick manufacturing out.
...and then also things like Y Combinator being one of the recruitment arms for this US empire (alongside all the US universities like Stanford, MIT, etc.) - luring technologists and scientists from other countries in, in order to capture and monopolize new advances and adding these innovations to the US portfolio as part of the supposedly neutral US-led 'intellectual property' regime (WIPO, TRIPS, etc.) [1].
I am against any system that aims to make knowledge artificially scarce and monopolizes parts of our collective human inheritance (all of humanity's scientific and technological discoveries). I am for new systems which respect both our world's 1) actual material scarcity (natural resources, human labor, etc.) and 2) it's immaterial abundance (any knowledge/resources that can be replicated by (digital) technology).
Not sure what the big deal is about this. I'm posting this on a similar-spec'd Moto E6 I bought new last month for $59 that included enough minutes and data to last me a year (as I mostly use it on wifi). Service is thru Tracfone (a Verizon MVNO). Phone is responsive with no bloatware or forced ads. Phone and plan are available here:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/283841361848 .
The moto G is or was $40 several years ago. In my cheapskate days I relied on it for a while. Slow but perfectly acceptable. Probably would have performed better if I'd bothered with a custom ROM...
I am confused as to what exactly the novelty of a $50 smartphone is at this point.
Just another data point I suppose, to support the drumbeat that smartphones are very cheap now, and are the ubiquitous default computing device for most people by now.
You can't even keep your kids off smartphones. Their friends will just give them last year's model they were gonna toss in the trash and they'll use it on wifi. Teachers don't even try to keep the kids off the phones in class. When I subbed in a classroom last spring, I once had a kid come up to me to ask me something, and then bury herself in phone distraction before I could even answer, and then act annoyed and surprised that I interrupted her to answer the question she herself had gone out of her way to pose. I was baffled. This was an extreme case but not by that much.
The kids are downright addicted, for the benefit of big internet shareholders, as big tobacco once did.
When I was that age I was often very bored. This inspired me to find ways to use my brain, to read, write, draw.
That we is gone now. Private boredom has been co-opted and is now owned by big internet for their benefit.
We had TV to plague us in the same way then of course. But at least TV was less engaging and less omnipresent. As soon as you left the home your mind was free.
There are the sidewalk philosophers who say that "things always change, every generation complains of kids these days" but this is a facile and ignorant retort. For 10,000 years technological change has happened yes, but at a much slower rate. What changes today in half a generation, took several generations for most of human history. Parents had a fighting chance to hand down knowledge of how to navigate the world, and to figure out over several generations how best to adapt oneself to new technologies.
Readit News
"Reliance Jio will soon start selling an Android phone which they have called Jiophone next, and it will cost Rs. 3500... probably."
This is total spam. The title has nothing to do with the content of the article... The phone isn't introduced by Google, it's introduced by:
> Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, doing business as Jio
and guess what, the article is total speculation:
> As far as the pricing is concerned, JioPhone could be priced as low as INR 3499.
Emphasis on 'could be' added by me. It isn't released yet and apparently the author is just guessing what it could cost... based on what?
Besides, how is it surprising that this is subsidized? This device is network locked and handicapped.
Jio phones are totally handicapped. They don't even allow users to open a wifi hotspot because that would compete with their wireless routers. Maybe that's what they are 'collaborating with google' on.
This isn't news it's an advertisement.
What ever reasons(App ecosystem majorly) led Jio (An investor in KaiOS) to ditch KaiOS is applicable to all other manufacturers too, Especially if Google(another investor) partnering with them(Android Go? Subsidizing HW?).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is classic PR, inventing a fake reason why a profitmaking move is somehow altruistic.
It works on many such as you because many such as you are steeped in the middle class world of $300 flagship phones every couple years and were unaware that decent sub $50 phones have been around for years.
Even a pretty nice phone like a Google pixel or Google pixel 2 can be had for about $100 used. They work great still and only have issues because of intentional choices by Google to prevent security updates. It's only a policy thing, no technical cause -- custom ROMs allow latest Android to be used just fine.
I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.
PS: I relied on the $40 moto G for a few years without issues except "kind of slow". I upgraded to a used Google pixel off eBay for $100 a few years ago. I'm a software engineer and use plenty of popular apps. The forced upgrade treadmill is totally artificial. Just look at the specs on the Google pixel 2 vs pixel 5 sometime. No practical difference, just a bunch of marginal gimmicky stuff like 4 cameras, fingerprint readers that are on the screen instead of the back, etc.
Pretty much nailed it. How many big companies are out there, which are not taking advantage of their partial monopoly or huge influence?
Money always wins. Capitalism encourages for endless growth and profits.
I still use my 10-year old Samsung Galaxy 2 phone (mainly as mp3 player and spare phone when I want to take a more expendable one).
Flash it with cyanogen and you have a basic smartphone that still feels snappy.
https://cyanogenmodroms.com/i9100/
My main phone is a 5 year old Galaxy S7 and I would very likely buy another as my main phone if this one was lost.
Deleted Comment
The 300m people Jio is hoping to migrate from 2G to 4G with this phone will now be able to use essential apps such as those needed for Covid vaccination registration, job searches and digital payments. Hence this is hugely empowering.
I find your comment a little disheartening, sorry. You could buy on a black friday sale, or eBay - but so what? The target segment for this phone makes less than $300 a month.
Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.
Both companies sell ads. Data they collect is used to target those ads. That is their market edge. It doesn’t even make sense for them to want to sell data to 3rd parties because it would diminish their ad-targeting advantage.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other reasons to be concerned, but the myth of Google or Facebook “selling your data” is just wrong.
Deleted Comment
Well to actually talk about Google and ads, amazing how bored kids in Eastern Europe made fake news websites to earn Google ads revenue, not caring how it affects the people and the world.
This is exactly how we ended up with QAnon, anti-vaxxers and people taking horse dewormer.
I'd argee with you ~15 years ago, but with the internet now being more or less dominated by companies who profit off "engagement" and are hawking any content (no matter how false or harmful) as long as they can get eyeballs to look at their ads I'm not sure it's that good of a thing.
The web is mostly only useful to a tiny percentage of the working class who have been somewhat able to get a successful formal education, and who go on to take up a spot as a privileged knowledge worker/labor aristocrat. For capitalist owners there is no toll-booth they cannot get past (through acquisitions/informational duopolies).
Today's education system is itself a traumatizing Hunger Games-esque competition (it was to me), and ends up debilitating and wounding most of the working class, convincing them that they are dumb and incapable [1], and most of all competitors to conquer. The public facing web you talk about ("all the worlds information") is actively hostile to beginners/learners, and is mainly designed to control the feedback from what today's dominant institutions/organizations are spouting out at us (it is far from the two way 'global village' McLuhan talked about).
I keep seeing access to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube touted as some sort of standard or benchmark for online knowledge equality, yet this narrative just serves as a self-justifying tool to remedy the survivorship guilt most labor aristocrats feel. As I wrote recently:
> It isn't access to Google search and Wikipedia that made the best scientists and engineers, it was access to commoditized knowledge which is enclosed, re-enclosed and then rented out in small amounts to the highest bidders (i.e. the so called 'prestigious' universities in the global north). In other words, it's held hostage behind corporate firewalls.
What we need is a distributed knowledge commons, as well as fully open-access scientific production systems. This means abolishing the IP regime and abolishing Silicon Valley. [2]
I see two of the highest leverage points for this being 1.) the Valueflo.ws vocabulary and system, which can help us rapidly replace today's corporatized siloed Enterprise Resource Planning software/systems, in favor of a fractal inter-organizational networks (similar to project Cybersyn in Chile under Allende [3]), and 2.) the holochain/ceptr (metacurrency project) framework, which has the potential to completely rewire/rearchitect the web using it's BitTorrent + Git + cryptography qualities [4] (keyword: agent-centric).
[1] Why I started my own Sudbury Valley school, https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2013/06/why-i-started-my-ow...
[2] Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[3] Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
[4] Reinventing Applications by Nicolas Luck https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
Your comment is insane dude. The knowledge commons is the public internet. Silicon Valley is just a place in California, why does it need to be abolished lol.
Have you recently seen cities in "third world" countries like Uganda or Kenya? They look pretty modern. I don't buy that access to information relies on a cheap spying and data collecting device there.
Therein lies their motivation. Another data grab disguised as good deed. I long for the days when Google was benevolent (or at least the impression they were existed)
Doing otherwise is almost always is a violation of the law and shareholders would sue executives if done differently.
Ads, engagement, loot boxes, freemium upsells, pyramid schemes, fintech, issuing debt...
Smart money takes their profits. Retail investors are lucky to get some cheddar. Throngs of customers saddled with debt.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Deleted Comment
* 5.5-inch HD+, 720x1440
* Snapdragon 215 SoC
* up to 3GB of RAM
* 32GB storage
* 2500mAh battery
* Android 11 Go Edition
If those are indeed the specs, I'd call it a very good option for that price point.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/jiophone...
There, fixed the title.
This has little to nothing to do with helping people in the Global South, it is a calculated investment by Google/Alphabet.
If you are working class and you live in the global south today, your life is often already a living hell because of this [1]. This flavor of hell will slowly 'trickle up' to the north as more and more spaces of the commons are plundered through imperialism, increasing inequality while more and more members of the working class become alienated.
[1] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
Deleted Comment
Of course this is nothing new. This is one of my favorite scenes in Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg
I am against any system that aims to make knowledge artificially scarce and monopolizes parts of our collective human inheritance (all of humanity's scientific and technological discoveries). I am for new systems which respect both our world's 1) actual material scarcity (natural resources, human labor, etc.) and 2) it's immaterial abundance (any knowledge/resources that can be replicated by (digital) technology).
[1] Against Rentier Capitalism: David Graeber, Michael Hudson & Guy Standing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rlIXAUGans&t=944s
https://9to5google.com/2021/08/30/google-assistant-kaios-tex...
I am confused as to what exactly the novelty of a $50 smartphone is at this point.
Just another data point I suppose, to support the drumbeat that smartphones are very cheap now, and are the ubiquitous default computing device for most people by now.
You can't even keep your kids off smartphones. Their friends will just give them last year's model they were gonna toss in the trash and they'll use it on wifi. Teachers don't even try to keep the kids off the phones in class. When I subbed in a classroom last spring, I once had a kid come up to me to ask me something, and then bury herself in phone distraction before I could even answer, and then act annoyed and surprised that I interrupted her to answer the question she herself had gone out of her way to pose. I was baffled. This was an extreme case but not by that much.
The kids are downright addicted, for the benefit of big internet shareholders, as big tobacco once did.
When I was that age I was often very bored. This inspired me to find ways to use my brain, to read, write, draw.
That we is gone now. Private boredom has been co-opted and is now owned by big internet for their benefit.
We had TV to plague us in the same way then of course. But at least TV was less engaging and less omnipresent. As soon as you left the home your mind was free.
There are the sidewalk philosophers who say that "things always change, every generation complains of kids these days" but this is a facile and ignorant retort. For 10,000 years technological change has happened yes, but at a much slower rate. What changes today in half a generation, took several generations for most of human history. Parents had a fighting chance to hand down knowledge of how to navigate the world, and to figure out over several generations how best to adapt oneself to new technologies.