In Kenya, Android smartphones for $ 80 fly like hotcakes

It seems that yesterday only the most advanced and wealthy citizens could afford to buy a smartphone. Today, these devices are popular even in the poorest countries. A few months ago, Huawei began selling an IDEOS smartphone through the East African mobile operator Safaricom. And by now the Android device has been bought by more than 350,000 Kenyans ! This is in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

The success of IDEOS shows how important the price-quality ratio is for the wide distribution of modern technologies. Of course, this would not have been possible without the open source Android operating system.

You can compare the cost and characteristics of Android-smartphone with its "competitors" from Apple, Motorola and Blackberry, as well as with one of the world's first smartphones - IBM Simon (1994).


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As you can see, with a slight deterioration in the technical characteristics of Huawei IDEOS, the order wins in price.

However, not everything is so joyful and serene. The Kenyan forums are filled with complaints about short battery life. In remote areas of the country, this can turn into a problem, because it is difficult to find an outlet for recharging there. The operator Safaricom even published a special instruction to reduce the power consumption of the device.

Despite these disadvantages, the advantages of Android still outweigh: these are worthy specifications, this is the Android Market with 300 thousand applications and the most important thing is the price, because the smartphone costs only $ 80.

Residents of poor African countries are ready to spend a monthly salary on a smartphone for a reason. For example, at a recent entrepreneurial conference in Nairobi, some of the innovative Android applications aimed at the local market were demonstrated. One of the programs is called M-Farm and allows farmers to broadcast prices for agricultural products in real time via SMS. Another application, created by specialists from a local university, is designed to diagnose and track the spread of cereal diseases through crowdsourcing. Or the winner of the program competition is the Medkenya medical reference book . This is just the beginning, and in the future there will probably be hundreds of different medical applications for Android. And not only medical, but also others who are able to help residents of the country to take full advantage of the information age.

As the Minister of Information of Kenya said at the presentation of Huawei IDEOS, the presence of a smartphone is no longer a luxury for the elite, but a necessary accessory for each person, because it affects all aspects of our life.

Of course, the Huawei product is not the crown of evolution. But the day will come when high-tech devices cost mere pennies, so that absolutely everyone on Earth can afford them. In this sense, the $ 80 Android smartphone is a sign that we are moving in the right direction.