The chimes they are a changing: India has a €3.30 Ringing Bells smartphone

17 Feb 2016

Raising numerous questions about how it can make a profit, a new smartphone in India called Ringing Bells that will cost you just €3.30 has been revealed.

It seems that, every few months, there is news of some new ultra-cheap smartphone on the market, but this recent news really pushes the barrier of cost-effectiveness from a company perspective.

Equally, from a market perspective, the competition and sheer abundance of mobile phones has contributed to the news towards the end of last year that the global smartphone market slowed to single digit growth for the end of 2015.

But it seems that, in countries like India, no one is reading the script, with the recent launch of the Ringing Bells 251, probably called so because it will cost someone in India just 251 Indian rupees, or around €3.30.

So, the obvious question is what spec does an ultra-cheap smartphone actually have? Is it powered from your sweat? Is your phone routed directly through the NSA’s servers?

Based on what Android Headlines has dug up, you’d have to say its computing power is not too bad, but obviously not terribly good, either.

Ringing Bells 251: the spec

With a 4in 960 x 540 LCD display, the 251’s processing power is also rather low-scale with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal, expandable storage and a 1,450mAh battery, all of which is operated on Android 5.1 Lollipop.

For the snap-happy Indians out there, there’s also a rather low-quality 3.2MP main camera and a barely-pixeled 0.3MP selfie camera.

In terms of connectivity, it has 3G connectivity – which is pretty important in countries like India, where people have limited access to fixed-line broadband – as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.

So, pretty much, it will do everything you need your phone to do at a minimum, for the price of a cheap sandwich here.

Indian people using phones image via arindambanerjee/Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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