I’ve been mulling the idea of buying a cheap disposable Android with which to port B2G onto. These cheap Androids can be quite cheap. One I bought was $56, the other $77. Shipping was for both.
My selection algorithm was:
- Order by price
- Filter to Android 4 or greater
- Check out any orange (firefox) coloured phones
- Find two distinct phones with the same System-on-Chip (SoC)
My final selection was the “M1 Smartphone” by “htm” , and the “Tengda H10” and by “htm”.
M1 by “htm”
Tengda M10 by “htm”
My last experience with cheap Chinese origin Androids was one of the first generation Android tablets. The device was a clone of the iPad and featured a resistive touch screen. Calling it slow would have been a complement. From that baseline these devices have a good chance to impress.
These devices might look quite different but they are in fact almost the exact same. The variety in the cheap android market place is misleading. Under the hood most devices are quite similar. In our case these two phones have the same SoC and camera. By having two similar devices my hope is to create a B2G configuration which will work for all MTK6572W devices. The two devices are from the same manufacturer but do differ in RAM, flash, and baseband. This should give a workable sample of similar devices.
Or maybe they’ll become paperweights!