A smartphone costing just £2.50 has launched in India

[HEXUS]

And it boasts an IPS screen, a 1.3GHz quad core SoC, 1GB of RAM, Android 5.1, dual-SIMs...

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[Tefno]

Wow, that's crazy!
Surely they can't be making money at that price? Wonder if it has inbuilt ads or something and the idea is to flood the market and gain income that way!

[virtuo]

Even with the cheapest lowest quality parts, how on earth are they able to do it at that price?

Can see these flooding eBay if the GSM standard it uses is compatible with our networks, can't imagine the screen is up to much, but at that price it'd be a perfect kids phone. And MicroSD too. Could wire one of these in to a car and easily track it.

[Kanoe]

Its been reported that they are discounting it and selling it below cost price to try and get users to buy them. Apparently this approach was also tried by a Indian tablet producer but it didn't last long.

Can't be a good business model to employ that relies on investors pumping in cash in order to sell a product below cost. Don't think it will last long.

[Kushan]

There's wide musings that this is a massive scam.

The theory is that they'll open pre-orders, literally millions of people will order the device and they'll be told it'll be delivered in a few months due to serious demand. After that, they vanish with the money and people will largely forget about it because it's such a small sum.

[Macman]

So who's been suckered into buying one yet.

Own up lol.

[rpjkw11]

One of these should be as good, if not better, than my 6+ yo tracfone (non-smart phone). The price is right anyway.

[Tabbykatze]

I bet they get their money by it being laced to buggery with advertisement systems.

Maybe even leaks to Indian Secret Services for ninja lynching

[smargh]

Yeah, needs some packet sniffing & maybe a dump+disassemble to see what's going on in the background. Difficult to do baseband though.

[OilSheikh]

Maybe they are all recycled iPhone 1 from the developed countries?

[adam0r]

Yeah, needs some packet sniffing & maybe a dump+disassemble to see what's going on in the background. Difficult to do baseband though.

Not on plain old GSM, it isn't.. that was cracked years ago :-) GSM only uses 64-bit A5/1 encryption - You only need 3 minutes of eavesdropping to decrypt a call.