In software project management there is a balancing act that every manager makes, consciously or subconsciously, when working out what sacrifices can be made to complete a project.
Imagine a triangular scale, each corner is labeled as follows, cost, time and quality. The idea being, that you can only pick two, to meet your requirements. Whichever to two you pick, the other is affected negatively. For example if you want your project to be delivered on time with quality, then the cost will go up. Conversely, if you want the project to be on time and cheap, then the delivered result will be of low quality, and so on.
Now moving onto the mobile space, manufacturers must also go through as similar balancing exercise when deciding on the feature set and cost for a new phone.
In this case, the criteria used on the triangular scale are
Ergonomics (battery and screen)CostFeature setErgonomics is the look and feel of the phone, and also includes the quality of the screen and battery life. These are grouped together because a bigger screen means a bigger phone frame, thus a larger battery.
Features is a combination of, memory, CPU power, and network capability such as LTE.
So if you want your phone to be cheap, but with a lot of power, then it will suffer from a poor screen, bad battery and look as ugly as sin. Think of those cheap chinese imitation phones and tablets.
For the high-end phones, that look good, have big screens, dual/quad-core processors and come with big batteries, then the cost becomes a premium.
Another example is the ZTE Blade (in the UK as Orange San Francisco). Here the phone meets good ergonomics (big screen and battery life), and low cost, but has a single-core 600Mhz processor, i.e. a lowering of the feature set.
Of course, like many technological companies, mobile phone manufacturers are always improving the hardware capability of their phones. i.e. while dual core processors may have been considered to be high-end last year, today they are mid range, being surpassed by quad-core.
So what does this mean for our balancing equation? Well it just means that the feature set is relative to other phones on the market. So the rules in the equation still holds. So you need to take into account the feature set of the phones currently in the market. If dual cores are common then quad-cores are the high-end.
So next time you are disappointed with a new phone on the market, be it on cost or spec, think about the decisions that manufacturers have to go through in bringing that phone to market.
Pete Baker is a writer for http://android-zone.com/. A blog about the Android platform, covering news, analysis, development and reviews.
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