The Truth Behind India's $4 Smartphone

(Baonghean.vn) - On February 17, Indian phone company Ringing Bells launched the Freedom 251 smartphone for less than 4 USD. Just a few days after its launch, this high-tech phone with a super cheap price has shaken up the information technology industry worldwide.

The Freedom 251 phone is available for less than $4.

The Freedom 251 has a 4-inch display, a 1.3-GHz quad-core processor and 8GB of memory. The Chinese-made phone is currently on sale for just 251 rupees (about $3.65) and promises to revolutionize the Indian phone market and bring the Internet to millions of people in the country.

However, those in the industry find this hard to believe. "It looks like a joke or a scam. The authorities are investigating," said Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association.

In a letter to India's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Mohindroo said that using the cheapest components alone would cost around 2,700 rupees (about $40), and adding taxes would cost at least 3,500 rupees ($52).

Richard Windsor, an analyst at Edison Investment Research, is also skeptical about the phone. At current prices, he thinks Ringing Bells will lose $26 on each phone sold, and will probably raise the price to $53 after the first batch. Ringing Bells has not responded to these concerns.

There have been some signs of copyright infringement on the Freedom 251 phone, with attendees at the launch event saying that the prototype phone had a different brand masked over it, and the home screen icons were identical to Apple's iOS operating system.

Windsor has a few theories about why this happened. He suggests that the Indian government is subsidizing the phone, or that a manufacturer is trying to weed out substandard products, or that a Chinese company is trying to penetrate the Indian market by selling cheap products.

Ringing Bells has denied that its products are subsidized by the government. However, its prototype is said to resemble a phone from Adcom, a technology import company, so the phone is likely to be from overseas – most likely China.

Ringing Bells has now announced that it has stopped taking pre-orders after its website was overloaded with traffic. The company also announced that the first phones will be delivered to customers by the end of June 2016.

Thanh Hien

(According to CNN Money)