India's $11 cellphone could change the world

[Permalink]

and i want one. does it use standard SIM card? specs say dual sim hubba hubba! :wink: i want

That can’t be three phones a day… three models a day? Is that even possible?

Where do they claim it runs Cyanogen? It looks like the bog standard MTK-sourced cellphone UI/OS that all off-brand, low-memory phones use.

1 Like

Android phones are getting cheaper… but not that cheap, not yet. $40/50 maybe, but not $11.

Also, the $20-30 dollar FirefoxOS phone that launched in India last year was pretty much unusable.

Does it have some sort of a serial or USB port? At least internally? This is 20% of the cost of GSM modules, could be priceless (okay, cheap!) for M2M applications!

+1 for using a fist shape in a wordmark logo. Some actual creativity occurred there.

3 Likes

One million smartphones in India’s actually not that hot as far as market penetration goes. If a mainstream manefacturer got one in twelve hundred people in the West to buy their product then they’d hang their heads.

Even at volume prices, $11 is cutting real close to manufacture+IP license costs (around $8?)… That is, assuming you want 512Mb RAM and a reasonably well supported SoC, both requirements for Cyanogen.

I don’t think it runs Cyanogen either. Neither Micromax’s website, nor NDTV, mentions it.

Looks like another gongkai phone.

Yeah, this just seems to be another standard cheap phone. Not a smartphone. I can’t figure out why there is an article about this, you can pick up a phone much like this around this price point at Wal Mart. Perhaps the press release was exceptionally well written?

i’ve got one on “order” pal in BLR + co-worker travelling there… it should be back by mid april. i’ll let ya’ll know. :slight_smile:

If you read the “full” specs, it says that it supports dual SIMs, both GSM but not 3G. So that means it’s a 2G or 2.5G phone, and you won’t be able to use it in the US for long, since the carriers that support the old standards are either shutting them down soon or have already done so, letting them reuse the spectrum for 3G or 4G/LTE. (Not sure how much of Europe still supports <3G; India’s got a lot of it, so those phones would be useful there.)

The specs also don’t say what frequency bands are supported; they vary by carrier and country, though presumably it’s the ones that are popular in India. Battery life’s pretty sweet, so these could be a good travel phone if you’re going to places that support them.

1 Like

In Europe, 2G and 3G hop on the same frequency bands, so when the shutdown comes it will be for everything. In addition, GSM-standard 3G HDSPA is just packet(data) access, not voice, so normally 2G is used to make all calls and signaling - even on modern LTE phones!

In fact, as far as last year, virtually no released phone with LTE would successfully work without a 2G backbone (ie. getting and receiving calls and text messaging, emergency services) and those will become bricks just as well as this $11 cheapie.

1 Like

When you can change the color and call it a new model, why not?

Smartphone market wise, pretty impressive - that’s about 5-10% of the market. Keep in mind, this is within three months or so. They sold 100000 units on a single day!

It’s not going to go all >3G for years now; most people have a cheap 2G instrument and don’t really care too much about the 'net…

GSM 900 and 1800. That’s typical for these candybars in India. Most 2G smartphones are quad band.

Post author here: I got the Cyanogen reference from here: http://qz.com/367643/how-shampoo-sachets-can-help-micromax-become-one-of-the-worlds-top-five-phone-makers/

Him, reading the article it seems they are talking about their YO phones, that are “online only” (like Firefox OS?), not this Joy series.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.