STMicrelectronics, Ericsson Team Up For Low-Cost Android Phone

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While Android is an appealing mobile operating system, the barrier to entry can be high. Android phones aren’t cheap, with Verizon offering the Droid in the US with a $200 subsidy and the Nexus One is just as expensive with a data plan. STMicroelectronics, a Texas-based mobile semiconductor manufacturer and Ericsson, the Swedish cell giant (also known has co-owners of Sony Ericsson) are teaming up to bring low-cost Android phones to market.

ST-Ericsson, as the joint venture is known, has been around since last year but now, details about their plans are coming out. They’ve developed the U6715, a cheap mobile phone platform that will run ARM-based processors and is ready for any variant of Linux to be installed on it.

ST-Ericsson says that the platform, despite being low-cost, can support the seven pillars of all the successful smartphones – navigation, web browsing, video streaming, e-mail, WiFi, 5-megapixel camera and a touchscreen. They’ve included a separate multimedia engine that handles the video processing, keeping the ARM processor free for running applications. Manufacturers could potentially go with cheaper ARM processors with little loss in performance, since the processor won’t be handling multimedia.

They imagine that this will create low-cost smartphones in the market since the big cell manufacturers won’t have to bother with the R&D time and money producing this platform themselves. Their goal is to have smartphones for sale less then €100 ($138). The company says we can expect to see smartphones based on their platform to start shipping in the first half of this year.