Obviously it's not much, but these smartphones are getting into dumbphone territory, and are going to all but wipe out the Symbian dumphone market in these developing markets, much like it's already happening in China and India.
Next year's Cortex A7, which has Cortex A8 performance (2010 flagship chip) and much lower price, being 5x smaller[1] in size (the CPU core itself), and the fast Jelly Bean OS should greatly improve the experience of such low-end smartphones going forward.
Of the Android devices that have access the Google Play store in the last 14 days, Google reports that 10% are running Froyo and another 4% are running a version older than Froyo. However, I imagine the number of Froyo devices is even higher if you include crappy devices that do not use Google's Play store.
More telling to me is a browse through the smartphone section in big Tokyo electronics store.
There are probably on the order of 30-40 different models, and I'd say at least half say "OS: Android 2.0"... :(
[Those are typically older models, of course, but with new phone models released constantly, the oldest are not more than about 1 - 1.5 years old. Also, some of the models I saw running 2.0 looked pretty up-to-date hardware-wise. It seems manufacturers are not always so keen to use the newest OS version...]
You need 768MB of RAM for Android 4, and realistically a decent GPU. 256MB and the most basic $0.50 ARM chipset from Qualcomm [1][2] will get you up and running on Android 2.x.
Yes, it is a bit, but not like iOS6 would run much better on these devices anyway. If the new chips can use some decent GPU's the experience should be significantly better on ICS/JB than on Froyo, though, because the UI wouldn't use so much CPU time anymore, and wouldn't choke as much doing regular operations.
No amount of efficiency in a new version will instantly get all the old devices upgraded. Froyo will live as long as most devices it came preinstalled on.
William Kamkwamba was 14 and living in Malawi when he built a windmill out of scrap parts based on a design he found in an old textbook.
Here is a quote from an interview[1] with him:
"So, when Tom told me I could find any information on the Internet, the first thing I did was search Google for windmills. I was amazed that I could find pictures and information — even instructions about how to build windmills. When I built my windmill I just used a book with pictures! I was amazed. Everything I needed to learn had been hidden in the Internet the whole time!"
When women basket weavers in rural Peru had access to SMS, they were able to cut out the middleman to sell their products. They got better prices and was able to communicate directly with the people that would sell their products.
Now imagine a smartphone, access to vast knowledge. So many more possibilities than a feature/SMS phone.
The $50 smart phone may have 3g internet capability but do the networks in sub saharan africa have reliable 3g coverage. For me in my part of africa the answer is no.
