$20 Smartphones Coming Soon

ARM is a British company that licenses those tiny chips that make smartphones work so ... smartly. Prices on the chips have been creeping ever downward in the last few years, and ARM is now saying that the cost of an ultra low cost smartphone will go down to as low as $20 within the next few months. Of course, these things won't be the gee whiz devices that tech enthusiasts love, but they'll still cover most of the basics and provide a decent experience for customers in those ever-important emerging markets where the smartphone has yet to take off.

According to ARM at its Tech Day 2014 conference in Austin, Texas, these cheaper devices will cause the low- and mid-range smartphone and tablet markets to more than double over the next five years, resulting in almost 2.5 billion total mobile device shipments by 2018. And they’ll probably all use ARM chips, because along with power consumption and performance, the other corner of the mobile computing triforce is cost, and ARM scores so highly on all three metrics that it’s no surprise that it has completely dominated the mobile market.

Other players, like Intel, might be able to compete in terms of power or performance, but ARM’s strategy of licensing to any company on the planet regardless of their size appears to be the winning method. For instance, in 2011, cheap-and-cheerful Chinese ARM licensees sold around 15 million tablet chips; in 2013, that figure was 100 million. To complete the picture, four years ago the ARM tablet market didn’t even exist. Technology marches on. Seems there's a good chance that in the not-so-distant future, everyone on Earth is going to be connected by smartphone.