On Jan 19, 3:58 pm, Moandji Ezana <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Karsten Silz <[email protected]>wrote: > > > Firmware upgrades are an expense to both vendors and carriers that benefits > > mostly the Android ecosystem, not the vendor / carrier, so both would rather > > sell you a new phone / contract. > > Do carriers really make much money selling phones?
Sorry for being imprecise: Vendors want to sell new phones, carriers new contracts. Carriers subsidize phones because they make more money on the contracts than what they spend on subsidies. > For manufacturers, it should work like any other project: you include > maintenance costs in the price. Android vendors - except for Samsung which also sells their own OS and Microsoft phones - make a tiny profit compared to Apple, Nokia and RIM (these four took 97% of the profit of the top 7 mobile phones vendors in Q2/10; http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/17/androids-pursuit-of-the-biggest-losers). So they can't afford to do many firmware upgrades for years to come, especially since they customize their phones to for different carriers also. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
