What are Android One phones? Which one to choose?

Google has launched the Android One phones on 14th of September in India. The concept of Android One was already mentioned in the Google I/O in San Francisco. But a lot of people are confused about what exactly is this Android One? How Micromax Canvas A1, Karbon Sparkel V, Spice Dream Uno are related ? So lets dig more how Google came to this.

Video Explanation of Android One During Google I/O

Google was always against the heavy use of bloatware on top of the android platform by the manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC which reduces the vanilla experience of android. Thus came the Nexus Devices in the market to provide the sleek, fast, stock android experience to the users. The nexus devices were manufactured by different manufacturers depending on their contract. Just like one nexus device was by Samsung, tablets by Asus and the latest Nexus 4&5 by LG. There is a rumor that the next version of Nexus would be by Motorola. There are also Google play edition of HTC M8 and Samsung Galaxy S4 which come with stock android rather than the HTC Sense or Touchwiz respectively. So shortly Google want to increase the number of android users by providing better experience.

Micromax Canvas A1

It is a known fact that the number of smartphone users in India is increasing drastically. Though most of the phones in the Indian market are android phones, the performance of only the high end phones are being proven smooth, consistent and satisfying the user. The lower end smart phones 4-12k range was always a adjustment whether it be in terms of hardware or software. After the re-entry of Motorola in India, the picture has slightly changed. Not to forget that even Motorola phones came with the stock android and Google backup for publicity. The largest smart phone manufacturers of India like Micromax, Karbon, Spice provide high configured phones at lesser price but still provide a bitter experience to the user in terms of usage due to the optimization problem in terms of hardware and software. Thus Google came up with this idea of Android One in order to capture the market in India and provide better experience to “Aam Aaadmi”.
Android One is a family of android phones designed in collaboration with different manufacturers to provided better hardware and software at optimized price.

Karbon Sparkel V

In this, Google provides the manufactures with the hardware design to be used and also provides the stock android 4.4.4 optimized for the given hardware. Thus all the manufacturers are bound to keep the hardware and software same but can change the outer look and feel. The three phones released have 4.5″ screen, IPS LCD FWVGA display, 1.3 GHz Quadcore Mediatek processor, 1GB Ram, 5MP rear and 2 MP front camera, Mali 400 GPU, 4GB Internal Memory and external memory supported upto 32GB. The specifications seems to be decently good for the price of 6200-6400.

Spice Dream Uno

Not that Micromax, Karbon and Spice were not providing the phones earlier with these specs for the same price. What really matters is the optimized stock android provided with the Android One phones which will improve the performance. Added advantage is the promise of latest Android updates for 2 years which is very rare at this price range. So whichever phone you choose from the three, it does not matter alot. Keep in mind that though Google was the creative mind behind this, the hardware is manufactured by the companies collaborated and the warranty will be provided by only them and Google is no way responsible for the issues. So, just choose the company with a better return period in after sales.

Comparison of the Android One phones with Moto E and Xiaomi Redmi 1S would be posted soon. Stay tuned for more news on Android One. If you have purchased one, let us know about the user experience.

If interested in getting hands on any of these Android one phones, you can find the product descriptions in the links below:

Buy Micromax Canvas A1 with Android One (Magnetic Black) from Amazon

Buy Karbon Sparkel V from Snapdeal

Buy Spice Android One Dream UNO Mi from Flipkart

Click here to know more about Android One in Google’s own words.