The other sub-$50 single-board computers
Raspberry Pi is not the only low-cost single-board computer capable of running Android. Darren Yates explains the benefits (and drawbacks) of the alternatives.
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Despite phone makers seemingly fast running out of people who haven’t yet bought a mobile phone, 2019 was still a decent year for them, with market heavyweights Apple and Samsung leading the way. However, according to market analyst firm Omdia, the largestselling Android phone for the year wasn’t the Galaxy S10, or the Google Pixel 4 XL nor was it officially sold in Australia. It was the budgetfriendly Galaxy A10. Now this is a phone that sits under the Galaxy A20 that sells in local supermarkets for around $180 (and which came fifth in 2019 sales charts). However, it shows that while many of us look longingly at folding screens with three-digit refresh rates or SoCs with laptop-busting performance, we buy what keeps the bank manager (or significant other) happy. In fact, budget phones can offer a lot of fun, provided you manage the risks.
QUAD-CORE COMPUTER FOR $19
There’s no taking away from the Raspberry Pi how it has rewritten the textbook on ‘low-cost computing’. I wrote a cover feature about it back in the September 2012 issue of APC. But the rapid proliferation and commoditisation of mobile tech has created plenty of similarly-priced alternatives – some closer to home than you’d think.
My first Android phone was an HTC Desire, purchased on a $49 monthly two-year plan in 2010. At the time, the Desire, with its fast 1GHz single-core CPU and massive 3.7-inch screen, sold at retail for around $800. Ten years later, my local supermarket recently advertised a Boost Mobile-locked Alcatel U3, with a basic 1.3GHz quad-core SoC and tiny four-inch screen for the princely sum of $19. I didn’t buy it, as I’d already bought Boost’s previous budget model, the rebadged ZTE Blade B112, for just $14.50. Pushing the budget a little more, we found the 2019 ZTE Blade A3 selling as the ‘Telstra Essential Smart 2’ for as little as $44.50, and the last-generation Nokia 2.2 as a locked prepaid option for only $89.
WHAT’S YOUR POINT?
My point is this – sure, these are cheap phones and, shock of shocks, they’re not as good as a Galaxy S20. But see them for what they are – incredibly low-cost portable batterypowered computers with loads of wireless connectivity and enough processing speed for some really interesting applications – and things actually start looking up.
You can’t buy a Raspberry Pi greater than ‘Zero’ in Australia for under $50 – and to which, you still have to add keyboard, mouse, screen, power, storage and OS. However, you can buy a prepaid Android phone that comes with most of this built-in.
Now I’m not suggesting a prepaid
phone can replace a Raspberry Pi outright – but I am suggesting they can be an alternative. As for the idea of ‘on-going costs’ with phone network charges, really, what charges? Keep the SIM card in the box and you’ve got a cheap portable computer. You can’t run a phone on USB power without a battery installed, but you can happily run a phone without a SIM card in place.
THE DRAWBACKS
To be fair, though, living with budget phones isn’t necessarily a life of beer and skittles. In fact, if you intend to use one as your daily driver, you need to choose extremely carefully – and it’s not just about whether or not the screen is bright enough outdoors.
The one major problem Android hasn’t really progressed far on in the last five years is security updates. My 2017 Motorola Moto G5 is still a decent functional phone, but it hasn’t seen a security update since February 2019 – and most likely won’t. But these updates aren’t just important for the Android OS – they may also be needed to rescue your phone’s hardware and if you own a phone with a MediaTek chip, keep reading.
MEDIATEK ROOTKIT FLAW
MediaTek doesn’t have the same profile in phone chip design as ARM or Qualcomm, but it produces a sizeable chunk of the chips that go into budget and mid-range phones and tablets, as
well as some Android TVs. So news that a rootkit-style security flaw has been lurking around in a number of MediaTek’s chips since April 2019 has been greeted with alarm – and this is where Android’s security update problem rises to the surface.
Android phones are an uneasy alliance between four key players – the phone maker, the phone’s chip maker, the phone network service provider and Android itself. Google produces security updates every month, but it requires at least the phone maker to certify that the update doesn’t send their phone pear-shaped. If the phone is locked to a network provider, that provider usually has to give it the once-over as well. While mid-range phones generally see a couple of years of quarterly updates, budget phones rarely fare as well. Given, by definition, there’s little money to be made from budget phones, these devices rarely see more than one initial security update.
The MediaTek rootkit vulnerability is said to be serious enough that the chip maker couldn’t afford to leave its solution update in the hands of phone makers. As a result, reports are it tapped Google to push out a special security update directly to affected devices. That’s drastic – but so is the flaw, which is said to allow an app to gain temporary elevated privileges or ‘root access’ and do lots of fun things with your phone.
AFFECTED MEDIATEK CHIPS
The list of MediaTek chips affected is substantial and said to include the following units:
MT6735, MT6737, MT6738, MT6739, MT6750, MT6753, MT6755, MT6757, MT6758, MT6761, MT6762, MT6763, MT6765, MT6771, MT6779, MT6795,
“To be fair, though, living with budget phones isn’t necessarily a life of beer and skittles. ”
“With Telstra planning to shut down the 3G network in June 2024, despite still being four years away, you can expect to see cheap 3G phones flood the market. ”
MT6797, MT6799, MT8163, MT8167, MT8173, MT8176, MT8183, MT6580 and MT6595.
It covers a range of phone models from Motorola, Oppo, Sony, Huawei and others.
To know if you have one of these chips, head to Google Play and download ‘CPU-Z’ and either look at the initial ‘SoC’ tab or the secondary ‘Device’ tab. In my case, the ZTE Blade B112 has one of the affected chips, the MT6735, so it’s a live issue for me.
However, before you use this to write-off budget phones altogether, Samsung and LG phones featuring certain Qualcomm chips were noted late last year as suffering a ‘secure world’ security flaw that could enable root-access and other security leaks.
The Mediatek issue goes by the security code ‘CVE-2020-0069’ and the fix is built into the March 2020 Android security patch.
GO EDITION OS
Budget-priced phones are also the domain of ‘Go Edition’ versions of Android, my recent purchase of a ZTE Blade A3-2019 lurking as the ‘Telstra Essential Smart 2’ being my first. Go Edition releases are for devices with 1GB of RAM or less and a result of ever-increasing OS complexity filling up RAM and making low-spec devices
seem sluggish to use.
While Go Edition gives you lighterweight Google apps, the OS itself hasn’t affected any of productivity apps I’ve tried so far, nor does it appear to overly restrict performance.
The Blade A3-2019 features a 1.4GHz quad-core Cortex A53-powered Unisoc SC9832E chip and from some preliminary machine-learning bench-tests I’ve carried out, it appears to have roughly 90% of the performance of Motorola’s 2017 $399 Moto G5 phone and its eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chip. For a phone that cost me $44.50, that’s not a bad result. The screen is definitely not as good and it lacks USB-OTG, but I’ll argue for some applications, it gives more bang for buck than a Raspberry Pi 4.
CONNECTIVITY
Connectivity generally isn’t an issue either for budget phones – Bluetooth 4, Wi-Fi b/g/n and 3G/4G phone network access are all pretty standard