The $20 (R400 in SA) phone that should have SA operators salivating Qualcomm has built a sub-$20 4G/LTE “reference design” phone that it hopes third-party manufacturers will soon bring to the South African market. Apart from lowering the bar to access, the phone, once introduced here by smartphone makers, could have a big impact on local mobile operators. The idea is to get consumers off 2G phones so that network operators can reallocate spectrum currently used for 2G (which was built for voice calls) and reallocate it for 4G (built for broadband). The company’s reference design is a device that looks like a feature phone — it has a low-cost 2.4- or 2.8-inch VGA screen with a 3-megapixel rear camera and 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera. It runs Android KitKat, which has a smaller memory footprint than more recent versions of the Google operating system, and offers peak download speeds of 150Mbit/s. Munn believes manufacturers should be able to bring phones based on the reference design to the South African market for less than R400. Chinese manufacturers have already begun selling low-cost phones based on the 205 chipset in India. See http://ift.tt/2gNaOmU
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