Last week, Motorola announced with great fanfare that the GSM Association (GSMA) had awarded it a tender to produce an ultra-cheap cellular phone for rural communities.
The handset in question is its C117 model, which will retail at under $40 apiece, which amounts to roughly R250.
At first glance this looks like a bargain. But, think about it - isn`t it a bit ridiculous to pitch a R250 phone at people who make only R250 a month? This isn`t really manna from heaven for those who live on less than $1 a day - and many South Africans do.
This is almost as ludicrous as shadow boxing in the dark.
If I were a cynic, I might speculate that the market research behind the pricing involved approaching the first African-looking person they found on Fifth Avenue in New York and asking if he or she thought $40 was good price for a mobile phone. No matter if the African-looking person was someone like Tokyo Sexwale or Felicia Mabuza Suttle - if Africans thought it was cheap, it probably was, and therefore was ideal for the developing world.
But I can see it now: a rural family in sub-Saharan Africa sits around a fire as Dad shows off a sexy little C117. Somehow, I don`t think the wife and kids will be so enthralled when they learn that there won`t be food that month thanks to the new device. Will they be any less hungry when they can communicate across the digital divide?
What about charging the phone in a rural hut, or the fact that calls will not be free either? Will families end up going into debt to buy airtime? Motorola is confident that a few hand-operated rotary chargers per village will sort out the charging issue. Is it just me, or are there drawbacks to this idea too?
Isn`t it a bit ridiculous to pitch a R250 phone at people who make only R250 a month?
Kaunda Chama, features editor, ITWeb
In addition, the average rural person does not read or write English very well, so that little aspect of developing menus in indigenous languages should have been looked into even before the first units came off the assembly line.
It`s a noble undertaking, but I have a suspicion that Motorola and the GSMA will have to go back to the drawing board with this one in, say, the next six months or so.
If this venture is to be given a chance at success, Motorola and the respective network providers in the target countries need to come up with some way of subsidising the total cost of the handset, airtime and chargers, otherwise they will have as much chance of success as hosting an international snowball fight in Malawi.
Essentially, the research and demographics on this venture were surely off-centre. Motorola and any other handset vendors that will work with the GSMA on similar ventures need to undertake comprehensive research before throwing what they think is ultra-cheap merchandise in poor peoples` faces.
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