In an effort to get extra mobile customers off its legacy 2G and 3G infrastructure, Vodacom South Africa has launched a 4G “smartphone” that prices simply R249.
The Mobicel-branded cellphone, which Vodacom has described as a “cloud-based handset”, is being launched to “scale back the price of smartphone entry within the nation” and emigrate extra of the operator’s prospects to 4G.
Till now, the most cost effective 4G-capable smartphones in South Africa have price at the least twice that for essentially the most primary fashions.
Vodacom’s new cloud-based cellphone, the Mobicel S4 Cloud Cellphone, comes normal with in style purposes comparable to YouTube, TikTok and Fb, all accessed through the cloud, giving customers a “smartphone lite” expertise, the operator stated on Tuesday. The cellphone doesn’t seem to help WhatsApp, nevertheless, which may very well be a deal breaker for a lot of shoppers. The cellphone has simply 48MB of RAM and 128MB of storage with a 2.8-inch display screen and a 1 000mAh battery.
“The cloud cellphone will assist prospects nonetheless anchored to 2G telephones and never accustomed to the touch-screen expertise, permitting them to understand a clean transition to the info and software world,” stated Davide Tacchino, managing government for terminals at Vodacom South Africa.
“Via higher collaboration between governments, cellular operators and everybody throughout the worth chain, we imagine we will make strides to work collectively to decrease 4G-enabled smartphones costs,” he stated.
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“Over the past decade, Vodacom has remained dedicated to bringing the price of units down by many initiatives launched in partnership with Vodafone. This included the launch of Vodacom-branded machine items, driving smartphone penetration in quite a few Vodacom markets, together with South Africa.”
South Africa’s cellular operators are beneath stress emigrate legacy 2G and 3G customers to extra fashionable expertise so the spectrum may be freed up for extra superior applied sciences, together with 4G and 5G.
Vodacom cited a 2022 Vodafone-funded report by the Broadband Fee for Sustainable Growth in 2022, which argued that decreasing the price of units is vital to growing entry to smartphones.
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“The Alliance for Reasonably priced Web estimates {that a} smartphone priced at R1 094.24 (US$62/ €56) may price nearly 63% of the common month-to-month revenue throughout Africa. The Broadband Fee’s report beneficial that so-called thin-client telephones – like the brand new cloud-based cellphone which Vodacom has delivered – needs to be explored. The brand new cloud-based cellphone leverages the facility of cloud computing to ship a variety of options usually related to entry smartphones at a extra reasonably priced price.” — © 2024 NewsCentral Media
