So, lots of you may have heard of the Freedom 251, a smartphone made by a little-known Indian company Ringing Bells. The headline figure is that it is less than $4, which is unbelievably cheap, especially when you consider that it has fairly decent hardware for the price. They include;
Looks like the deal of the century, especially since it's touting Moto E-like specs for the same price as a bag of Lay's. However, it seems to be pretty shady. Let's break it down.
1) The phone looks nothing like the initial render
When the phone was released, the website showed this picture.
However, when people got their hands on it, it was painfully clear that the actual device looked NOTHING like what was shown. Ringing Bells has affirmed the error and made the appropriate change.....to the website.
Looks drastically different now, does it?
2) The phone had white-out on the original manufacturer's logo.
Notice what's wrong with the picture up top. (Pic by Vishal Mathur). There's white-out on the top. What happens when you scrape it off?
(Pic by Vishal Mathur)
Yep. The phone is actually the Adcom Ikon 4, a Chinese-manufactured device for the Indian market. It costs $37 just for the housing. That's way more than the MSRP of the entire F251! Something is definitely amiss here.
3) How is it so cheap?
A phone that costs less than 4 bucks (or 251INR) is certainly going to raise a lot of eyebrows. Just how is it even possible for a company to sell a phone at a price that's actually 1/14th of the price of the Ikon 4 that it is 'based' on. Does the phone even pass India's safety tests? Even when manufacturing is subsidized, this phone can't turn a profit at $4. Something doesn't add up.
I'm not even going to go into the broken website that buckled so hard under the strain of all the demand even though the company could pay for full-page ads on newspapers and how the UX is basically a clear rip-off of iOS. Overall, I just don't think this is the deal of the century. More like the biggest scam of 2016. Right now, I'm just sitting back on my chair, seeing how all this goes.
It still looks like a lot of phone for $4 and it should be a great way to get many Indians who don't have the financial strength to afford a decent phone to use one and get online, but so far, it's pretty darn sketchy.
Yeah, clearly not a ripoff (Picture by Gadget 360)
- A 1.3GHz quad-core processor
- A 4-inch qHD 960x540 IPS display
- Android 5.1 Lollipop
- 8GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 32GB
- 1GB of RAM
Looks like the deal of the century, especially since it's touting Moto E-like specs for the same price as a bag of Lay's. However, it seems to be pretty shady. Let's break it down.
1) The phone looks nothing like the initial render
When the phone was released, the website showed this picture.
However, when people got their hands on it, it was painfully clear that the actual device looked NOTHING like what was shown. Ringing Bells has affirmed the error and made the appropriate change.....to the website.
Looks drastically different now, does it?
2) The phone had white-out on the original manufacturer's logo.
Notice what's wrong with the picture up top. (Pic by Vishal Mathur). There's white-out on the top. What happens when you scrape it off?
(Pic by Vishal Mathur)
Yep. The phone is actually the Adcom Ikon 4, a Chinese-manufactured device for the Indian market. It costs $37 just for the housing. That's way more than the MSRP of the entire F251! Something is definitely amiss here.
3) How is it so cheap?
A phone that costs less than 4 bucks (or 251INR) is certainly going to raise a lot of eyebrows. Just how is it even possible for a company to sell a phone at a price that's actually 1/14th of the price of the Ikon 4 that it is 'based' on. Does the phone even pass India's safety tests? Even when manufacturing is subsidized, this phone can't turn a profit at $4. Something doesn't add up.
I'm not even going to go into the broken website that buckled so hard under the strain of all the demand even though the company could pay for full-page ads on newspapers and how the UX is basically a clear rip-off of iOS. Overall, I just don't think this is the deal of the century. More like the biggest scam of 2016. Right now, I'm just sitting back on my chair, seeing how all this goes.
It still looks like a lot of phone for $4 and it should be a great way to get many Indians who don't have the financial strength to afford a decent phone to use one and get online, but so far, it's pretty darn sketchy.
Yeah, clearly not a ripoff (Picture by Gadget 360)
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