Nowadays, smartphones are a thing of necessity more than a luxury. This is the reason that we have seen various smartphones which are low on pocket but high on features entering the market to woo people of all classes alike. But, there was one smartphone that literally took India by storm this year with its price point. Ringing Bells, an Indian startup, literally turned heads when it launched its flagship product, the Freedom 251 at a price point of just Rs. 251 ($4). Yes, you read it absolutely right, it actually is 251 and no, I’m not missing a couple of zeroes there.
Hearing the price, many tech experts were sceptical about how a good quality smartphone can be manufactured at such a low price. In fact, many argued the fact that the manufacturing cost of even a simple feature phones with the basic talk and text features is at least $15. So, a smartphone at $4 seemed was a hard thing to imagine. But, it seems, Ringing Bells, had seemed to defied all odds and made the impossible, possible.
The low price is the reason that the phone’s stocks sold out like hot cakes within a few minutes of the pre-booking going Live. Of course, this made a lot of people furious and adding to the company’s troubles was the technical snags that the pre-booking experienced. But, leaving all those troubles behind, the Freedom 251 is finally going to see the light of the day this week. According to sources within the company, the deliveries of this revolutionary smartphone can be expected to begin from June 30.
Freedom 251 will flaunt a decent 4-inch qHD IPS display, will run on a powerful quad-core 1.3GHz processor, and support a 1GB of RAM and a good 8GB of local storage, which can be expanded up to 32GB via a SD card. Along with all this, it will also sport a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 0.3-megapixel front camera.
Sounds pretty decent, doesn’t it? Well, at Rs. 251, it for sure is a steal deal and can really help in transforming India into our Prime Minister Modi’s much ambitious Digital India. May be this is the reason many industry experts are contemplating if the device has been subsidized by the Indian government. Though as of now, these are just speculations as there’s no evidence to support the theory.