$80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next? | Hacker News Reader

$80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?

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196 pointsweston97 comments

It isn't a smartphone, it's a computer. This is the real "one laptop per child".

It is truly disruptive: in 1.5 years (Feb 2013), that $80 will buy twice the RAM, processing power, flash etc (or sooner, as they may well beat Moore's law via economies of scale).

Wow, I got shivers up and down my spine at the Medkenya: as usual, disruptive platforms carry disruptive applications atop. This can really change the world. All the great things that computers can do, these "smartphones" can do - not just angry birds.

Apple can't compete here, because they are only interested in cutting-edge technology that will not work unless it is put together with great ingenuity. It's essential that someone lights the way as Apple does; but it does mean that they have to keep inventing the next new thing to remain viable.

EDIT oddly, they are priced $176-249 here in Australia (our AUD is currently worth 5% more than the USD). Guess it's priced by market. And of course, you still need to pay for connectivity (I wonder how much that costs in Kenya?). A review and specs: http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/mobile_phones/huawei/id...

Agreed, this is potentially huge.

Can you imagine the effect of getting one billion of these to people? It's possible. Even if every one were paid for by charity, it'd be just $80 billion. That's a small fraction of the charitable giving in the world every year.

Even the stingy US foreign aid budget was over $45 billion in 2009.

Wouldn't it be better to get them a cheap laptop or something they can use to learn development and/or longform publishing of some kind?

Uh, even in the west, less than 1% of the population does any real development. Why bump the cost from $80 billion to $200+ billion to give everybody a big power-sucking device that can't be concealed and will do them only limited good over a smartphone?

These are people living off the land in third-world areas. Many are nomads. A communication and educational tool that fits in a pocket can be invaluable. In comparison, a bulky laptop does very little good at this stage in their development.

You make a good point, and this is certainly much better than nothing. I still worry a bit about the long term effects of so many people growing up with only consumption-oriented devies though. In richer countries I think it's less of an issue because people that really want to learn to create digital content can get the tools cheaply enough.

Android runs some scripting languages, so you can code on-the-unit. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ python, lua, beanshell (java scripting), perl and ruby (via JRuby) and some JVM languages.

Although scripting languages tend to be slower, especially on a smartphone and especially on this one (500MHz), they are increasingly mainstream, and the tools are available on the unit. And probably, vastly more powerful than the platforms most of us got started on (ZX81 here).

disclaimer: I don't have an Android, and haven't used these languags, so don't know what limitations they have on a smartphone, nor how serious those limitations are.

The next generation of phones/tablets already have HDMI out and bluetooth keyboard support. If people need or want such facilities it'll be faster and easier to get there from phones than laptops.

That could be. Plus the UI stack is a lot cleaner than what's available on desktop/laptop machines.

the 3GS is only $45 on AT&T. Some carriers overseas are offering the iPhone 3GS/4 for free (with a contract of course).

Not to diss Android, but iOS devices have better apps, better battery life, etc.

Those are all subsidized prices.. not the true cost.

all i'm saying is it would be nice if these users can at least have a great first-time user experience without having to worry about their phones crashing , running out of battery within 30 min. of use, or getting malware and trojans on their Android phones.

Why I feel that I am reading Engadget? This is not the kind of comment that I expect to read on HN.

Agree on you about the battery life, but I'm not sure about apps since I have never used an Iphone but ios is more mature so it had some head start so I guess its apps are also a bit ahead.

The cheapest Iphone here in kenya is about 450 USdollars compare that with the ideos at 80 dollars. With such a gap battery life ceases been an important issue for most kenyans.

I assume you're being down-voted because you are comparing the price of a contract-free phone with that of a contract phone (but excluding the cost of the contract).

A quick look at the AT&T website suggest that to get that $49 iPhone, you need to sign up for at least $55 of services per month for 24 months, which comes to $1369 total.

Sure, there are probably deals to be had, but you'll never get it down far enough to even pretend to compete with a $80 phone and $0-20/month off-contract minutes.

People who don't realize this should not bother commenting on the smartphone/tablet market. Not only are there enormously disruptive and empowering aspects to mobile platforms, especially in the developing world, but those aspects will also make such platforms enormously desirable. The potential worldwide market for mobile devices is staggering, even in the short-term. As poorer countries develop that market will just get larger, establishing a presence and a brand reputation today will pay huge dividends down the road.

Selling smartphones to rich people in rich countries today is certainly a good business, but ultimately it's the worldwide business and the volume business which will bring in the biggest share of revenue.

Meanwhile, imagine how these devices will change the world? How many people in the world have never made even a single phone call? How many people are illiterate? How will things change when they have the access to devices which are powerful portable computers, communication devices, and libraries? We think ebooks are important to us in the developed world, imagine how transformative they will be in a country without much pre-existing book ownership?

>Meanwhile, imagine how these devices will change the world?

you know, man, i want to believe it. Yet, i've just browsed Russian news and with Russia being much more further than Kenya down the road of technology penetration into everyday life there are some things that i sometimes think is impossible to change

http://top.rbc.ru/incidents/16/08/2011/610779.shtml ( google translate http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h... ) - in Kaluga (near the Moscow, so it isn't deep wild undeveloped far Russia) 5 teenagers (with a girl among them), while drinking, tortured a homeless with cigarette butts and ultimately burned him alive. Before jumping to the conclusion that these 5 are exception, note that only the one who doused and set the homeless on fire was charged. This situation got the attention only because the victim died, otherwise nobody would make any fuss at all.

Smartphones don't make people better, they just make it more likely they will record evidence of their crimes themselves.

Barbarism is the natural state of the world, we shouldn't be shocked that it continues to exist. Nor should we slack our efforts to roll it back and fight against it at every turn.

I'm really curious to see how long it takes for smart phones to become the expected norm in Africa.

Mobile phones are already a cornerstone of their societies.

And as those countries develop, generations will grow up familiar with a certain brand. e.g. see Toyota Hilex and Coca-Cola.

> How many people in the world have never made even a single phone call?

Not that many, actually. Mobile phones, and thus phone calls, are now pretty pervasive in homo sapiens.

I agree with your other points, though.

EDIT oddly, they are priced $176-249 here in Australia.

That was at launch 18 months ago, $99AU now. http://dicksmith.com.au/product/E7324/vodafone-huawei-ideos-... (that's with a 12 month statutory warranty, change of mind policy, etc.)

I did google around for several prices, but maybe they were all launch prices.

That one seems to be locked to Vodafone (tho I'm not sure if that's a problem, or how much that locking is "worth" in dollar terms).

Ah, I missed that, sorry. You can get them locked to Virgin for $80 from DSE, or on ebay unlocked for around $120.

I recently bought the next model along in this series, the Huawei Sonic, which DSE sell for $188 unlocked. Very happy with it, doubly so considering the cost.

I got mine (Ideos) for $AUD 129 unlocked. Very compact for a smart phone.

For using it as a laptop/computer, the display width is a limitation. At 320x240, that's 53 chars along the 320 edge. 80 chars would be ideal for an xterm (which larger phones can do, with 480x320). Do you think it's usable as an xterm (with a plug in keyboard)?

Kenya has a population of ~39,000,000 of which 40% live on less than $2 a day. I'm not sure many of those 300,000+ smartphones are going to the poor.

its more common in the middle class. Actually most of th people having the phone over here are young people (think 20 somethings) irrespective of the financial bracket of their parents

I work in Rwanda (http://www.nyaruka.com/) and we're currently doing a project for an NGO that is using the Ideos for a variety of different things, the pricepoint really is amazing.

For one, we're using them to act as SMS gateways to generate activation codes. Essentially they receive confirmation messages for mobile payments to a particular number and we wrote an Android app that generates a unique activation code and sends it back to the payer. Better than a PC because it's cheap, has redundant power, redundant network and better connectivity with the GSM world.

The other task we're using them for is to act as network attached barcode scanners for inventory control. Essentially using the camera to read QR codes and allowing people to move / receive / send inventory using a rich app interfacing to the cloud based backend we are building. They are amazing for that.

I guess my point is that this isn't just a milestone for the consumer, it is a milestone to have an easily programmable, portable, GSM connected device with a camera and a touchscreen that only costs $80. Nothing else compares.

Are you seeing any adoption by consumers in Rwanda? A few months ago you wrote an interesting post about the lack of SIM Toolkit support -- http://blog.nyaruka.com/androids-achilles-heal-the-sim-toolk... Is that hindering uptake? Any updates?

Sorry for the late reply, was asleep. :)

One of the carriers here just started picking them up, haven't seen them as much in Rwanda here as I have in Kenya, but they are still new.

The Ideos comes with a SIM toolkit, it's just the official 'Nexus' phones (and some others) that seem to lack it. So that part is fine, which is a good thing, because I buy electricity for my house using it weekly.

Is it insane to imagine that in 50-100 years the tech infrastructure in what is now the developing world could leapfrog the West due to this sort of thing?

Very interesting point. I'm from Nigeria and I've witnessed how technology cycles tend to work here.

In America and the West, the technology markets are efficient enough for incremental innovation to be viable enough for a new product. That's not the case in Africa (I can only speak for Africa, not the developing world).

We don't innovate incrementally but we take massive leaps between commoditized technology. we need to build a stronger internet backbone that will give developers an active Internet market to cheaply test new products. it will be difficult for us to incrementally innovate otherwise.

The west has a problem due to the oligopolies of the behemoths that control infrastructure. It is the reason for example why the US ranks low in broadband speeds.

That's more a problem for the US than the west in general. EU nations are more likely to use regulation to force large telecom companies to allow smaller competitors access to their infrastructure.

I do have one worry about this though. If this is the only "computer" a lot of people can afford, this is going to mean that the bulk of a generation is going to grow up without access to computers they can program themselves. Maybe I'm just being alarmist, but growing up all our family's computers were also programmable, so I went from basic to c to c++ all on the same machines dad used for Word Processing. Losing all that for the convenience of mobile seems like a questionable trade.

You are assuming that people in the developing world can afford a computer just as easily. The importance of having an information device that connects to the internet cannot be overstated in places where education is not the primary concern. Early access to technology will inspire many more kids to learn programming when they can afford one.

I agree there are some strong upsides, but phones make it difficult to participate in a meaningful way at the higher levels of the information economy. They're consumption-oriented devices. Here in Vietnam I see a lot of people that have blown their entire computing budget on a high-end mobile phone and I worry that they may have stunted the growth of some of their talent as a developer, writer, artist etc.

I realize that developers are rare but the money my grandfather invested in a C64 in 1983 has been repaid many, many times over. I'm not sure I would have the same incentive or opportunity to learn now.

You might have done more research than me on this, i.e. it's possible that this particular Android device doesn't actually allow it, but generally speaking you actually can do some amount of Android development on an Android device: You can install the Android scripting environment and Python for Android, and hack up Python Android apps right on the phone.

I don't mean to necessarily dispell your argument, though. I fully agree with you that it's really important that the computers we put into people's hands continue to be sustainable, i.e. that they're not just consumption devices but also allow the creation of programs. I probably wouldn't be a software developer today if my computer growing up had been an iPad, say.

Just that I think that of the current crop of smartphone platforms, Android probably comes closest to allowing and enabling hacking.

They will buy shared computers and hack on them. It's what I did growing up in India. Only, there will be a lot more of it, because these guys already have a device they know they can hack on, if they had a "computer".

sho\_hn mentioned the ASE, and I think he's on target. An important thing to remember is that these are Android phones. Unless they're unusually locked down, you can install anything on them through .apk, and the market itself has fewer restrictions. Theoretically, it's just as capable as a computer, albeit with worse input.

Hi, kenyan guy here. I bought the ideos 3 months ago. Love the android OS, I'm writing this using swype n what a breeze. the battery life off the phone is a but of an issue but if u disable things like GPS then you can get almost a full day worth of charge.

About data plans, i usually subscribe to 10MB per day at a cost of 8shillings(about 0.1 of a dollar). Though you can subscribe to 25MB pet day at cost of 0.25 of a dollar. You can also subscribe to unlimited data plan for 30 dollars per month. Of course this are figures for my carrier but those from other carriers don't differ by much.

I can say most people will move to android (at least my friends are planning to after seeing my apps). I mean, they were impressed by th fact that they can listen to any song using my jango android app.

I'm Kenyan too (in the diaspora, though) and I've been amazed by how quickly and thoroughly some mobile technology has spread back home. Services like mPesa that enable mobile payments are actually much better implemented and more widespread than similar technologies Stateside.

Even my grandma in Githumu which for years only had telephone service from 9am-5pm (and only via an operator) now has access to mobile phones will all the trimmings.

I might even send her a new Android phone for xmas :^)

do that. Its amazing, still not sure why nokia chose microsoft over android.

Your email's not visible in your profile. Put it in the About section, sawa?.

poa

@sadq70 on twittah.sent u mail from th same handle on gmail.will be at gkenya 2.0, you?

I've said it before, but I'll repeat myself: Android will be the dominant OS of this decade (found in phones, tablets, netbooks and other devices) because it is the only OS that is both fully modern and flexible enough to be adapted to whatever needs people have.

One thing I'd love to see from Google is more support for "platform developers" - docs, examples, tutorials and tools to help anyone get Android up and running on different devices.

The low barrier to entry for development is going to be important too. The development tools are free and run on low-end hardware and you don't have to pay a fee to distribute apps outside the app store.

Make no mistake, this is why Apple and Microsoft are afraid of Android and it makes their selfish bullying that much more reprehensible. Apple is never going to make an $80 phone.

And Google advocating for more android developers here in kenya helps. In fact they have a dev conference next month in Nairobi and Android is one of the topic list(plus GAE,GWT, chrome).

When I was travelling in Scotland I bought ZTE smartphone android 2.2 for 50 pounds without a contract just to use Google maps instead of paying expensive 10 pounds per day rental GPS. The touchscreen is horrible but the phone itself is pretty responsive ,Skype worked fine. Basically throw away smartphone for two weeks of vacation.

I have that phone. I run an Android 2.3.4 mod for it. I now get several days worth of battery life, multitouch and a very smooth responsive UI. That phone has proven to be a very hackable device and there have been some GREAT roms released in the last few months for that aging hardware.

Hi I have th phone, could you direct me to web resources that will guide med on how to install a custom ROM, my email is komuw05@yahoo.com Thanks in advance

You may want to hide your email address, or put it on your profile page.

I (probably) have the same phone as the grand-parent. Best modding info is at: http://android.modaco.com/forum/453-zte-blade-libra-blademod...

The Blade/Libra/San Francisco is a great phone, but it's not available for 50 quid, more like double that (though I bought mine for 70 a while ago, and got an AMOLED screen version too).

Maybe he was talking about the ZTE Racer, a previous best buy in the world of Android. Modaco also have info on getting the best out of that device:

http://android.modaco.com/forum/454-zte-racer-racermodacocom...

I got my Blade/San Francisco for £75. From time to time there are deals, Argos was selling them on discount, some online retailers were too, Orange had a weekend sale on them a few months ago, and of course the second hand market. But yes you are right, they are closer to £100 than £50.

http://blade.modaco.com/ is a real gem and truly the best place to get all sorts of roms for the phone.

I thought the article was a little low on content; found this one somewhat better written and more informative: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/37877/?a=f

Will probably be visiting Kenya shortly, so I'm definitely going to have a look at how 'mobile' is being used over there!

When you do, totally check out MPESA and how widespread it is. Mobile payment traction that a US startup would die for.

FWIW, T-Mobile USA sells this same phone stateside as the Comet[1] for $125 outright.

[1] http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/Phones/cell-phone-detail.aspx?c...

$79 from MetroPCS. http://www.metropcs.com/shop/phonedetails.aspx?productid=hwm...

Fantastic to hear about computing reaching the hands of the world's poorest. I wonder if poor battery life would be an issue in areas with limited access to electricity, but this could be powerful even if it reaches the more urban areas.

I love that it has a camera. I believe that omnipresent cameraphones have been an underrated deterrent for crime and government brutality in the last 10 years (in more developed countries).

More places are picking up electricity all the time. Oddly enough, the very solar panels and wind generators that are still seen as too expensive in e.g. the US can be a HUGE help in getting electricity to remote areas.

A typical cell phone battery stores 5-7 watt hours. With good sunlight, one 30-watt solar panel might provide full charges for 15+ phones in a day. Maybe add $10-20 to the cost of each phone to get a solar charging station set up in a village?

That wouldn't be so bad, all things considered.

Better insolation and no need to run wires to a village make solar panels a no-brainer in a lot of places.

Some entrepreneurs are already renting access to a charger. It'd be cool to get micro-loans for them to buy solar panels.

Good idea. Maybe I should pitch that to my contacts in Kenya

Cool!

Kiva has a few Kenyan MFIs, of which two look interesting: http://www.kiva.org/partners/133 http://www.kiva.org/partners/142

I'm guessing a lot of people would lend for this kind of initiative. Please contact me if you hear back from them: chebuctonian at gmail. Thanks! :)

Indeed, I found this true in rural South Africa. Almost everyone carried a "dumb" phone since obviously, cell access is vastly desirable over landline in those sorts of areas. Additionally, it would often behoove local groups to team up and get a small solar generator. Both for the savings (even a small panel could provide much of their daily energy use) as well as for increased self-reliance from the "grid" (or, more like the "wire", if there was one).

Solar panels are only "too expensive" in the west because:

1) the west is used to consuming a lot more electricity

2) power lines from coal plants are cheap here. There, they don't even have the plants yet.

In other words, they don't need a whole lot of juice there, and whatever other alternatives exist (if any do) are even MORE expensive.

Solar panels actually aren't a great option here believe it or not. People have been trying for a long time to get them working well and they just don't. Typical problems are theft, quick degradation from too much sun etc.. They are also pretty darn expensive.

There are other options though. One of the more interesting ones is being done by Nuru, which sets up micro-businesses of people who charge lights / phones / radios using a pedal powered generator. Those generators are really simple, last a long time and they are set up right from the start to provide an income source for the owner.

That said, smartphones aren't really viable for the 'villagers' for a while still, charging every day really isn't practical even with something like that, it is just too expensive. But there are still a ton more just above them that live in more urban environment where electricity is available, and for them cheap smartphones can really change things.

In Kenya, in areas where people don't have electricity, there are usually phone charging kiosks with large banks of car batteries.

And if you think about the amazing stuff, like the M-Pesa mobile payment system, that they were able to build up with dumbphones (M-Pesa is something like 40% of transactions there), just think what they can do with relatively open and cheap smartphones.

I get annoyed at Android manufacturers for always underpowering the batteries. It seems like extra spending on the battery would make it a better device than spending on RAM, CPU or thinness.

I hope that competition will kick in, once there's enough for RAM and CPU for everything you'd ever want, and batteries become the next differentiator.

I couldn't find much about data plan pricing in Kenya, but if I'm reading this[1] page right, there are unlimited plans for the equivalent of about USD $10 per month. Really not that bad.

[1] http://kalahari.xtgem.com/internet_tarrifs_in_kenya

Not that bad, but only with US salary. Take into account average family income in Kenya.

What kind of average family is buying an $80 cellphone? The majority are still going to use cheap used phones shipped in from the EU, or discarded by the richer members of their society.

I'm assuming that most of the people in Kenya buying a smart phone are going to be on the upper end of the income distribution.

The majority are using features phones(from edge-bluetooth-o.x-MP-camera to basic call-&text) manufactured by Nokia, samsung, lg,SE and Shenzhen. People rarely acquire phones discarded from the richer.

Why no mention of that badly photoshopped image of the girl supposedly holding the phone?

http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Kenyan....

Beneath which they say 'Hwawei's IDEOS smartphone' -- meaning Huawei.

I have a variant of that Huawei phone charging in front of me. The battery life is appalling - It is charged twice a day. Luckily there are android mods that have multitouch integrated back into the rom.

However I paid €25 for it on prepay after a rebate from my operator. An incredibly inexpensive device!

QVGA (320x480) is a different aspect ratio than most Android phones which are 480x800 or 480x854. The size makes it look bad, but the aspect ratio makes designing a layout that looks good on all handsets really hard. Guess which one will get left out.

When the choice is between "no smartphone" and "smartphone with suboptimal/clumsy layout", guess which one gets picked?

Not to mention that screen res and "looks good" is a specs geek problem not a real problem, anyhow. It somehow isn't stopping people (in Kenya, where I am in Australia, presumably all round the world at all economic levels) from finding these phones useful.

Have one in Australia, the aspect ratio is more of a problem for Market manifests blocking downloads than actual usage - once you get an .apk, most apps scale such that they are still usable.

Some insightful discussion @ Berkeley TIER's mailing list

https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/pipermail/tier/2011-Augu...

Does anyone know of a cheap Android phone that can run Flash 10.1 comfortably?

my $3400 macbook doesn't run Flash comfortably

The computer for the rest of us?

The title of this article tells me nothing. The real question is, how well do hotcakes actually sell in Kenya?

Why do we care about a $120 difference in the cost of the handset when you are going to sped at least $1600 on a contract over the 2 years you are required to sign it for?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why anyone cares about the prices of phones (unless they're outrageously high i.e. the original iPhone's $500).

This is not the pricing model used in African countries. So the price of the handset does matter.

As I understand it, most mobile phones in Africa are pre-paid, using per-second billing.

$80 in Kenya, with probably market-rate voice and data (ie, reasonably cheap) will never see the light in the USA.

First you have the IP battles (patents, trade-dress, etc), then you have a consolidated and generally anti-innovation telecom monopoly.

What will happen is that the feature and dumb phone will be killed by cheap Androids... this will be mildly threatening to (currently) weak smartphone lines like WP7 and Blackberry, but will leave the iPhone unscathed for the near future.

Any prognostication more than 2 years out is useless (what happens when the real FacePhone hits?)

USA customers tend to compare unsubsidized phones to subsidized ones, and seem surprised when the $150 product isn't as good as the $600 one.

Not as surprised as they are when they realize how much they paid for the expensive phone, in my experience. Regardless of brand, it's baffling to me why people don't just wait a few months and buy a phone outright instead of getting the one with the very expensive contract.

Have you seen that MetroPCS commercial where the dumb kid takes the glittering gold phone only to to find himself swinging from a rope while the presenter admonishes 'Silly Billy! The contract is how the trap is sprung!' They should get some sort of award for promoting financial literacy at the same time as marketing their service.

If you buy a phone outright you still have to pay the same high monthly rates.

I pay $50/month for my line and another $35 for my wife. I don't spend a lot of time on the phone and I don't text at all, but I have unlimited data. More importantly, I barely bother to look at my bill because I know what it's going to be in advance. The lack of admin more than makes up for any minor economic inefficiencies - I don't grudge the phone company making a profit off my relative underuse of the voice service.

This exact phone is for sale in NZ, though not quite at that price point (around $150NZD here). I don't see your point.

$80 in Kenya, with probably market-rate voice and data (ie, reasonably cheap) will never see the light in the USA.

Newegg sells it for $140. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875606...

I'd be surprised if it's not available even cheaper through other channels, you can certainly buy it cheaper here in Australia on ebay.

(I bought the successor to the Ideos, the Huawei Sonic, for $188AU last week. My previous smartphone was an iPhone 3GS, and the Sonic compares very favourably to it - even before you consider price.)

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