Why trust Greenbot
When most people in the West hear “Samsung”, they think of devices like the Galaxy S4 or the Galaxy Note 3. The thing is, Samsung has a plethora of other Galaxy phones for people who don’t have $700 to spend on a phone or are in a country where two year contracts aren’t a thing. Devices like the Ace, the Young, the Fame, you might not be familiar with them, but they’re hugely popular.
Now in order for Samsung to make cheaper phones, they obviously have to use cheaper components. Samsung may very well make their own chips, but they only have so many factories, so they want to have said factories focus on a limited number of SKUs to achieve maximum cost efficiency. This is why you’ll often see Samsung’s sub $300 phones come with chips from Broadcom.
While Broadcom is great, and I have no beef with them whatsoever, there’s a bigger player out there who makes even better chips at an even lower cost, and that’s MediaTek. The bulk of cheap Android devices floating around China and several emerging markets are all powered by MediaTek, and Samsung knows this, which is why they’re rumored to be adding MediaTek to their list of suppliers at some point in late 2014.
How cheap will a MediaTek Samsung phone be? We’ll find out in a year.
