I'm not sure this is the conclusion that I would draw. It appears you're measuring technological progress by the gap between what is available in the 3rd world

I'm not sure this is the conclusion that I would draw. It appears you're measuring technological progress by the gap between what is available in the 3rd world vs. what is currently available in the 1st world. I would argue that making $50 phones is an amazing sign of progress as it speaks to just how amazing the technology behind manufacturing has got. In fact, it has almost been a side effect of Moore's Law (almost the de-facto measure of technological progress in the CPU space for a while) that processors have become cheaper as they became faster.