The State of Android on Clone Phones Today
Currently, there are several available Android alternative phones:
Clonedroidphone.com
Google Android on Clone Phones
The ‘App store’ Paradigm in the Developing World
Typically, the sales model for cell-phone minutes in the developing world is the purchase of minutes on cards. These cards, which are bought in bulk from the local service provider and resold locally, have scratch-off numbers that the user enters in the phone to purchase more minutes.
The iPhone ‘app store’ paradigm breaks down in an environment where credit card billing isn’t possible. But what could work? Prepaid cards.
Providers could use the same distribution mechanism as selling minutes - prepaid cards. App store credits might be bought using cell phone minutes, or separate ‘app credit’ cards might be distributed and resold.
On a local basis, service providers might have application repositories to which subscribing Android users have access. Pre-paid cards could be used for purchasing apps just as easily as for purchasing talk time.
CECT/SciPhone/HiPhone/Daxian Comparsion
This page is the best reference I’ve yet found, with a specification breakdown of most commonly available clone phones.
This is a short movie of Android running on a Nokia N95, an ARM11-based smartphone that ships with Symbian. The author claims to be dual-booting Symbian and Android.
Clonedroid - Running Google Android on Chinese iPhone Clones
Google’s Android smartphone platform, a free, high quality operating system and SDK for cell phones, opens up a world of innovation to ARM-based Chinese iPhone clones. The latest of these phones, such as the Daxian T32, theoretically have the horsepower to compete with Nokia, HTC, and Motorola offerings. What clone phones universally lack is a decent operating system.
I think that the nascent developing nation cell phone market represents the next iteration of the Internet, and global networking as we know it. These phones might be the OLPC realized, and more. They are effectively the PC for billions of consumers in the developing world just now coming online.
And I think there’s money to be made in localized, multilingual applications and web services.
