What phone does Wikipedia
founder Jimmy Wales have in his pocket? An unlocked Android-powered 3G
smartphone, made by Chinese mobile maker Huawei – which was selling for
$85 on the streets of Kenya last year and now goes for $50.
While the majority of Africa’s mobile phones are more basic talk-plus-text feature phones — recent figures from analyst ABI Research suggest
3G connectivity accounts for 11 percent of the continent’s overall
mobile subscriptions vs. 2G’s 62.7 percent – 300,000 of these $50
Android smartphones have been sold in Kenya, according to Wales and
African carrier Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore. The pair were speaking at
Vodafone’s Mobile for Good summit taking place in London today.
“What I always thought about mobile in Africa…is this [smartphone
adoption] is coming in the future — in the future someday,” said Wales.
“Well the someday’s happening faster than I ever realised.”
Wales’ own budget Android was brought back from Kenya by a friend and
is now his personal smartphone. “The screen is a little smaller than
the iPhone, it’s not quite as good but the battery lasts two days,” he
joked.
The Wikipedia founder has been spending the past couple of years working on Wikipedia Zero
– a project that’s aiming to broaden access to the online encyclopedia
to those who don’t own a computer or can’t get access to 3G mobile data –
but he says the pace of smartphone adoption in Africa is changing the
digital landscape of the continent much faster than people think.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
android still leading in africa and asia which is the promising and huge market
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