If you are a heavy mobile phone enthusiast or an enthusiast who likes to toss niche digital products, then you will most likely know that in today's smartphone market, in addition to a few well-known "head manufacturers", there are actually many relatively small labels.
Please note that we are not talking about some "disguised copycats" that rely on OEM and sell brand licenses to make a living, but those mobile phone manufacturers that are really making products with heart, but they are small in scale or focus on niche user groups.
Some of these niche brands focus on outdoor rugged mobile phones, and the products launched are anti-freezing, anti-drop, waterproof, night vision, infrared temperature measurement, laser ranging as a whole, plus seven or eight thousand, or even tens of thousands of mAh batteries, which can easily last for a month. Coupled with various "very powerful" configurations such as strong flashlights, ultra-loud speakers, maritime satellite phones, and even floating devices (which will not sink to the bottom and float up when thrown into the water), they are completely powerful tools for exploration on the go, even if they can be directly used as smashing people, it is estimated that no one will doubt them.
Of course, there are some niche brands that focus on privacy protection. Its smartphone products will use non-Android Linux systems, and come with memory chips full disk encryption, network traffic encryption, and end-to-end encrypted calls and email services, plus physical camera power-off design, and even some models will add "firewalls" to their own data cables, claiming to be able to shield potential hacker attacks.
In addition, there are some niche manufacturers who focus on the "environmental protection and repairability" of mobile phones, and they will use less glue and soldering in the hardware design stage, more screws and buckles for fixation, and use as modular component design as possible. In this way, users can easily purchase the corresponding module and repair and replace the mobile phone after it is broken, so as to directly extend the service life of the mobile phone and reduce the cost of "replacement".
Of course, considering that the above-mentioned "modules" are often not standard interfaces, manufacturers will not actually suffer, which is a win-win situation of "I give you environmental protection, you pay for me".
But having said that, if you really follow our descriptions to find the corresponding niche products, and plan to "try them out", then you will most likely find that their hardware configuration will generally be much lower than you think. And furthermore, they tend to appear "cost-effective" at the appropriate price range. So why is that?
Obviously, the "crowding" of hardware costs by various imaginative, "bells and whistles" niche functional designs is a factor that cannot be ignored. Take the ultra-low temperature resistant batteries and infrared temperature measurement devices used in some rugged mobile phones, their costs are not low at all. Not to mention the fact that a function such as a maritime satellite phone may cost thousands of modules. If you want to control the final price after adding it, then the configuration in the SoC, image, screen, etc. will be slightly reduced, which is naturally a normal result.
In addition, one thing that some friends may have heard (or perceived) is that there is a general situation of "rushing for production capacity" in today's mobile phone industry. Especially for some of the latest SoCs and the most advanced CMOS, the head manufacturers often either directly spend money on "custom research and development", or exchange sales guarantee for "the right to launch".
Under such a premise, these brands, which are not so wealthy, and can only mix in the niche market, and are destined to have little sales, let alone get the flagship SoC share at the same price as the head manufacturers, many times they can only choose outdated mid-range solutions with sufficient production (ku) (cun). Therefore, it is not surprising that it seems to lack competitiveness in terms of "cost performance".
Having said all this, for these niche mobile phone manufacturers, the objective "low cost performance" is not necessarily a problem in many cases.
On the one hand, as we mentioned earlier, the selling point of most "normal" niche manufacturers is not the traditional performance, running scores, and taking pictures. To put it bluntly, most of their consumer groups already have another "main machine", and they will not care about the "cost performance" of these products when they buy. Instead of a better SoC or a stronger camera, these consumers may prefer to pay for a larger battery, a brighter flashlight, or simply a more fancy design.
On the other hand, from the perspective of these niche manufacturers, using "less new" hardware solutions actually means that they do not need to bear a lot of potential costs of technology research and development, trial and error. For example, the system stability and application compatibility of the relevant mobile platforms have actually been verified, and the driver will also be a mature version that has undergone iterations.
In this way, for related enterprises, it is equivalent to reducing a lot of R&D costs, which can improve the profit margin of products in disguise. For the end consumer, this kind of product with a proven solution is often considered more reliable and practical than the flagship model of a niche manufacturer. So to some extent, this is also a product idea that is acceptable to all parties.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]