Android One expands to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka

Google plans to expand its Android One initiative to even more countries and plans to bring affordable Android One devices to customers in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

The Android One initiative from Google aims to bring affordable high-quality smartphones to as many people as possible. It was first launched in India back in September, with various hardware partners building devices and selling them to Indian customers online and in stores.

These devices offer modest, yet powerful hardware, and receive updates directly from Google. Since Google will be managing the software on these handsets, updates are expected almost as quickly as they are pushed out to Google's Nexus and Google Play edition devices.

Google doesn't want to stop with India and aims to reach out to the next five billion people. It will start this by bringing Android One to India's neighbouring countries.

Besides Karbonn, Spice and Micromax who build Android One handsets for the Indian market. Google has also partnered with companies like HTC, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer. Furthermore, we see Alcatel, Panasonic, Intex, Lava, and Xolo to build Android One smartphones. Given that none of the latter companies have announced Android One handsets yet, it will be interesting to see which manufacturers will bring smartphones to these new regions.

In countries like Sri Lanka, we find a majority of users still using feature phones, due to the high costs of smartphones. Even companies like Nokia (now Microsoft) offer usually affordable smartphones like the Lumia 520 at much higher prices than in other regions.

Android One gives the opportunity of bringing smartphones and Google services to even more users, and we are excited to see how this pans out in 2015.



source - Google | Android One



[UPDATE] [02/07/2015] It turns out that the Nexian Journey One from Spice will be one of the Android One handsets available in these regions. The device features a 4.5 inch display with a 480 x 854 pixel resolution, 8GB of internal storage with microSD, a 5MP rear camera, a 2MP front camera, dual SIM, a 1700mAh battery and a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with 1GB of RAM.

What's interesting is that the handset comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop pre-installed.



source - BGR (India)