I just received a message that the Indian government plans to release a smartphone called “Freedom 251“, which is supposed to be available for 251 rupees (3,28 euros). According to the website (which is offline while I’m writing this text), the Freedom 251 is supposed to have a 4-inch-display, a 1.3 Ghz quadcore processor, and one GB of RAM. The internal memory is only 8 GB, but you can upgrade it up to 32 GB with a micro-sd-card. The camera is suppsed to have a resolution of 3.2 megapixels, the front camera (which you can use for selfiesor skyping) will have a resolution of only 0.3 megapixels.
It’s supposed to be produced by a company called “Ringing Bells”, which was founded last year. In case you speak German, you can read the full article on this topic via this link.
However, I am very sceptical regarding the Freedom 251. While I was working at “Indische Wirtschaft” during my trip through India (as described in my book), I tried to order an “Aakash” – a tablet-pc which was supposed to be very cheap and therefore bring the world wide web to the masses. The order never arrived, and I’m not even sure if they still sell these things. Let’s just hope everything works out better with the smartphone.