A Samsung mobile phone is now available for only £3, according to a Yahoo! News article by Rob Waugh. The thing is, it’s just a flip phone.
The Samsung E1270, currently on sale through Rakuten, is not a smartphone. It is, in the parlance of millennials, a dumbphone. It doesn’t offer Wi-Fi. It doesn’t have a camera. It doesn’t have GPS. It doesn’t even know who Siri is.
Unlike, say, the Saygus V2 “superphone”, it doesn’t have a 1080p FHD 5″ screen, nor does its screen stretch across any of its sides, as in the case of Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge. And you can exercise as hard as you like, but it will not offer any of the biometric tracking that the Apple Watch allows.
So what does it do? It lets you text and call. If you are a millennial, you might be wondering what a call is. It’s an outdated – some would say “barbaric” – practice in which individuals actually speak to each other through their phones, kind of like Skype but without any video.
On a more serious note, a mobile phone available at such a low price can go a long way in serving the under-connected masses. At this years’ Mobile World Congress, there was a huge amount of buzz around initiatives from Facebook and Google that aim to connect the two thirds of the world population that don’t have Internet access. If nothing else, such a low price point for what can be considered as the basic minimum in mobility, paints a positive outlook for the communities without mobile tech.
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