On a conceptual level, I like the approach of building up a mini-smartphone from the bare essentials. A few years back Nokia acquired a company called Smarterphone that was doing this[1], and this updated Asha platform is apparently the first fruits of the acquisition.
The alternative is to take the "kitchen-sink" platform of Android which is actively developed for quad-core phones and full-HD displays, and try to pare it down to run on low-end hardware that's an order of magnitude slower and also has an order of magnitude less pixels to work with... While still preserving compatibility with half a million existing apps.
That's of course pretty much impossible, so instead the super-cheap Android devices are running old software from several years ago with extra limitations imposed by the low-end platform.
The difference in the two approaches is analoguous to Windows RT vs. iOS on tablets -- the other party tries to cut down the full system for cheaper devices, while the other builds up from software that's been proven on smaller devices.
The alternative is to take the "kitchen-sink" platform of Android which is actively developed for quad-core phones and full-HD displays, and try to pare it down to run on low-end hardware that's an order of magnitude slower and also has an order of magnitude less pixels to work with... While still preserving compatibility with half a million existing apps.
That's of course pretty much impossible, so instead the super-cheap Android devices are running old software from several years ago with extra limitations imposed by the low-end platform.
The difference in the two approaches is analoguous to Windows RT vs. iOS on tablets -- the other party tries to cut down the full system for cheaper devices, while the other builds up from software that's been proven on smaller devices.
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[1] According to previous reports, the Smarterphone OS had an app platform written in Scheme! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarterphone
...I doubt anything of that survives in the Asha platform, but it would be cool to do low-end smartphone apps in Lisp :)