Shortly after assuming office, Kenya’s President William Ruto promised to lead the country in launching its own locally manufactured smartphone within his first year in office.
“I want to promise the country that in the next 8 to 12 months we will have the cheapest smartphone in Africa, manufactured in Kenya,” he said in November last year.
Fast forward to today and the President was in Athi River at the site of the East Africa Device Assembly, a joint venture of local mobile network operators like Safaricom and Jamii Telecommunications Limited (JTL) and “international device manufacturers” that is overseeing the assembly of the promised “affordable smartphones”, to unveil the first batch of the said smartphones.
The catch? The said smartphones were neither locally manufactured nor exactly new. As is obvious by now, the devices are locally assembled at the country’s first smartphone assembling plant, which is a different thing from being locally manufactured, as had initially been promised. They’re also not exactly new. We covered the devices in question, the Neon Smarta and Neon Ultra, about 2 months ago when Safaricom debuted them. The devices have been on sale in the local market since then going for as little as Kshs 6,500 for the Neon Smarta as well as being available under Safaricom’s Lipa Mdogo Mdogo plans which allow Kenyans to pay as little as Kshs 50 daily for a smartphone.
Now, after today’s launch, the same same devices are going for a slightly higher rate, a far cry from the initially promised Kshs 5,000 price tag.
The Neon Smarta, for instance, is going for Kshs 7,500 from Safaricom outlets while the Neon Ultra is going for Kshs 9,000. JTL has the Smarta’s price at Kshs 8,000. The Ultra is going for a steeper Kshs 11,500, pitting it against most other entry-level smartphones in the market.
The Neon Smarta packs a smaller 5-inch display – compared to the larger Neon Ultra’s 6.5-inch panel. They’re both low-res panels (480 x 800 pixels), 2GB RAM, 32GB onboard storage and run on the Go edition of Android 10 – from 4 years ago.
On the camera front, the Ultra has an 8-megapixel main camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera while the Smarta has a 5-megapixel camera at the back and a 2-megapixel lens on the front.
The Ultra has a 3,750mAh battery while the Smarta packs a 3,000mAh unit.
The devices come with a standard 12-month warranty and are VoLTE-ready.
While the two Neon smartphones are single-SIM on the Safaricom end, those under the affordable smartphone program launched today and which come with out-of-the-box support for the JTL Faiba network have a different approach: they both have dual SIMs. While users of the Smarta have access to an open SIM in the SIM 2 slot on their devices, the SIM 1 is locked to the Faiba network and can only be used with a JTL SIM. Ultra users have no such restrictions and either SIM slot can be used with one’s SIM of choice from any mobile network operator.
Deal?
