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You are looking at people who buy mobile devices as accessories or luxury items. I, on the other hand, want to develop tablets for medical assistance, mostly diagnosis, translation and record keeping, and deploy them in my home country of Somalia, and the refugee camps in Kenya. Whether Apple sells X units or makes Y dollars is immaterial to me. All I care about is that every Android source file begins with a preamble that's sweeter than Aretha and Whitney to my ears: it promises me Freedom. Freedom to share, copy, clone, sell, give away. And from my experience, Dan Bornstein and the gang, bless their hacking souls, are here to assist me. My "users" might never care what powers their doctors' tablets (they don't even know what an OS is, in fact, most of them can't read) but I do. I know I can fly back to ShenZhen and shop for boards, case, power chords, and save money. And in the end, have a Free, world-class operating system waiting for me. To me Android is not a privilege, it's a right. It's what I will use to help my people. And there are millions like me who outnumber luxury mobile users by a huge margin. This is where my heart is at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726986 |
Or more pricey ones with 8", 10" screens, less or more branded.
Or, for example, Android netbook from Sony, definitely not cheap.
Or chose from several dozens of phones with prices starting from about $200.
About software development Mahmud wrote enough in comments.