Jimmy Wales: $50 Android smartphones are disrupting Africa | Hacker News Reader

Jimmy Wales: $50 Android smartphones are disrupting Africa

techcrunch.com

143 pointsmtgx79 comments

2 years ago I made this comment:

"Interestingly, outside the "1st world" mobile phones are quite common. The speed at which this technology trickled down is amazing, about ten years from yuppies in major cities to subsistence farmers in failed states. Even more amazing is penetration. Most things just don't go that far down the economic ladder at all. Basic, fundamental things like vaccination, artificial fertilizers, electricity or regular phone lines which our grandparents took for granted have been outpaced by mobile phones in many places.

Tablets may be similar enough to mobile phones for us to hope that the same economics apply and we might see the <$3-a-day majority benefiting by 2020. Hopefully."

So, where are we now? It really looks like smartphones might have the momentum to make it all the way down to the bottom. Lets hope it keeps going.

I really hate the word disrupt used in this way.

$50 Android smartphones are enhancing the lives of millions, maybe? Titling it this way sounds like they are some sort of addictive drug or natural disaster.

I completely agree with your dislike of the word being used that way. Having said that, you may not be far off with the "addictive drug" comment; anecdotally, I can tell you that I know people living below the poverty line who spend on the order of 30% of their gross salary to have a mobile phone (Southern Africa).

The circumstances which lead to that are probably pretty complex, but I'd say they include: a not very competitive market, geographical and other factors making mobiles the only effective technology for communications, marketing and social norms making mobile phones almost a necessity, a lack of basic financial education for many, etc. While I'm sure that people's lives are enhanced in many ways, I'm also sure that there are more responsible ways of spending the little money they do have.

The circumstances which lead to that are probably pretty complex

The main one being the massive desire and need of human beings to communicate with each other, and to feel empowered about their lives. Don't downplay that, there is nothing irresponsible about that.

I didn't mean to downplay that, and I do agree to some degree. But when you're having trouble providing basics for your family (as many people around these parts do), spending on flashy electronics is irresponsible.

True, IMO. They didn't disrupt anything because there was nothing to be disrupted. It's not like they had our version of Verizon, Comcast and DirectTV offering services in their village.

Smart/cellphones made it possible for them to get connected, if it was for wires, good luck waiting.

Your point is different than his, in that it's not actually a "disruptive technology", as there was no incumbent technology to disrupt. To your point - maybe it's disrupting the old dumbphones in the same way the iPhone did in the western world? Or simply disrupting the old ways of communicating (by mail, etc)?

Also, his point was that the "disruptive" word is what doesn't sound right here, as it sounds like "phones are disrupting the lives of Africans", which has a completely different meaning. I also kind of disagree with him here, because it's pretty obvious that Jimmy Wales was talking about technological disruption, and how it's a good thing, and not about "ruining people's lives", which I guess it's what someone else could understand from this title, but doesn't sound very likely.

You should not underestimate the life changing effects (aka disruptive) the availability of cheap smartphones had for large groups of the population in Africa (where many still live on less than $2 a day).

Many for the first time could pay / receive money directly e.g. without a middleman who collects percentages - most people still don't have bank accounts and can now do their payments / get paid via smartphones.

They can now communicate (long distance - private, business, emergency, political), some started new businesses around these smartphones, some became rich (some even billionaires without the sleaze) and can now provide their families with a much more solid basis to survive. There are now more people with access to mobile phones than to electricity in many parts of Africa.

These smartphones are also having an impact on the daily lives of many in developed countries. Many of the smartphone payment systems that are available since recently / will become available soon have been field-tested in Africa.

"life changing [..] (aka disruptive)"

Nope. Everything disruptive is life changing, but not everything life changing is disruptive.

1. To throw into confusion or disorder 2. To interrupt or impede the progress, movement, or procedure of 3. To break or burst

The rest of your post may be true, but is utterly besides that point.

It comes from the term "disruptive innovation":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

"A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market."

So the thing being 'disrupted' is the old way of doing things, the old telcos, the old money markets etc.

"So the thing being 'disrupted' is the old way of doing things, the old telcos, the old money markets etc."

I know that. And that's why saying "disrupting Africa", instead of "disrupting old African telcos", is silly/stupid. Good we cleared that up.

Isn't just about everything that's dirt cheap & available a "life changing effect" in Africa? But disruptive?

$50 Android smartphones are enhancing the lives of millions, maybe?

Why don't you give up all internet/communication access and tell us how much of an impact it has on your life (yes that includes any laptop/pc at home).

Or do you think African people are special & different from us Western people and don't have the same desires?

Re-read the post you replied to. It did not say what you thought it did.

It sure seems like the first comment in every story is some simple criticism or nitpick. It is starting to make this community look petty.

This is really great news, these are devices that we can develop for, and provide some incredibly useful utilities. Look for some interesting startups to come out of Africa taking advantage of this, and producing utilities for people in that part of the world.

I've noticed the same trend, and have similar concerns. It's not that a clarification or correction isn't necessarily a high-content comment, but it's far from guaranteed to be the highest.

I think the "minor gripe" is actually HN's version of the meme reply: easily digestible, doesn't take much effort, and easy to agree with. Just as reddit's frontpage is dominated by imgur links, so too are the comments on HN dominated by easy criticisms.

I've said this before: for any given story there will be people who disagree with it, and the way HN is currently designed, upvoting a critical post is their only way to express that disagreement.

I heard stories about hospitals locking cables into wall sockets because else people will use the power to charge there phones. So I think it can be disruptive. But I agree its a bit over the top to use the word disrupt in the context of the article.

Found video of the conference, here he speaks in part 9, and he pulls out the phone at 9 minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/_MVGnLZnMbs?start=549&autop...

Here is a screencap of the phone http://i.imgur.com/McJSj.jpg

African developers are building apps for diagnosing and tracking diseases in humans, farm animals, and crops. Also pest-outbreak tracking/warning, getting offer prices at local agricultural markets, disaster mitigation.

From August last year: http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-...

Also, Kenyans have been using phone credits as a form of exchangeable currency since the early 2000s.

Exciting stuff.

The killer product in Africa would be a 50$ solar powered smartphone I was in Madagascar and people there are walking huge distances just to go into a small shop where they can charge their phones.

it will NEVER be efficient to integrate these two technologies. A phone is something you carry in your pocket, a solar cell is something you leave out in the sun all day.

Yeah but it could recharge a small battery and that can recharge a puny phone.

That's exactly my point. Efficient solar cells being mass produced cheaply will be world changing, but no one is going to try sticking one on a phone unless they're a little dim. You have a solar cell at your home/town center that you recharge at.

I am too lazy too look but I remember reading a story where an $80 or so solar panel system (with some sort of battery, no doubt) from China enabled villagers in Africa to turn a light on at night and maybe recharge a phone. Simple but life changing.

When you have very few things, people get creative. In USA for example for the most part mechanics change a car part with a new one, in the third world they open it up, fix and get another decade out of it.

Didn't think about that. The second part is still valid though : having the electricity is the exception rather than the norm in most parts of Africa.

Depends what you mean "having electricity". Here's 3 cases: (a) Have electricity at home (b) No electricity at home, but have access to charge a phone at a shop/workplace/friend/neighbour (c) None of the above.

But what if somebody invented some kind of flexible and detachable tubular device, perhaps housed in a durable rubber, that contained some type of metal filament that was capable of transmitting electrical signals from A to B?

In sunhsine-blessed countries, one does not have a pocket, and indeed I would be happy of my iPad-New if it were light, thin, and would recharge itself while I used it for shade ..

My guess is that you are more likely to have shops selling charging as a service where mains power is problematic. Also http://biolitestove.com/

BioLite is amazing. In particular, I love this image: http://biolitestove.com/Media/HomeStove/Stories/Ghana-DSC_10...

Awesome, thank you for that picture.

When I drove into Poznan, Poland about 25 years ago and the first texaco station had just opened it looked really strange, a piece of high tech colour in the middle of a gray and drab city. A sign of things to come. This picture gives me a similar feeling.

We already have a lot of those in nigeria and also in other african countries. These charging shops are a necessary convenience and they provide jobs for the youths.

So how is 3G coverage in Nigeria?

Isn't the more sensible solution just a solar panel + outlet apparatus for charging anything? They could keep it at home.

That is already happening but more along the lines of 1-2 of those charging stations per "village".

It is. And they don't even have to buy it for each home, as it's pretty pretty expensive for an average African, but at least for say one village. Certainly much better than travelling even longer distances. Africans will improve this one step at a time.

I'm just gonna plug this, cos they are a great charity and I really like how they are ground roots innovative and solving real problems.

http://www.thefullbellyproject.org/Products/SolarHandCart.as...

Guess all they need is a couple of USB sockets on there now... :)

I absolutely love how we are going to get to see the developing world become developed in our lifetimes.

And how the level playing field will force us to scale innovation rather than operation.

Man, this is the best time to be alive!!

Thank you :-)

(Assuming that level playing field cures malaria etc - but Singapore did just by getting richer and politically compete t)

To me this is just another argument for The Great Stagnation. Don't get me wrong, it's fabulous that the lives of Africans are being improved by technology. However, what if Africa catching up with the western world is just a side effect of technological progress slowing down as Peter Thiel and others have commented about? We marvel at our smartphones, but so what. They make them in china for $50.

The affordable, wide-spread availability technology is not a negative indicator of technological progress. iPhones are less than 5 years old; it's a positive that they've distributed so rapidly.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson

The modern smartphone is a 5 year old product. The fact that it's managed to penetrate into the developing world in such a short amount of time is nothing less than amazing. This has absolutely nothing to do with stagnation.

5 years? How quickly we forget our history.

The Treo 180 was released in 2002. You connected to the internet by essentially dialing a modem over the cell phone network. It had a built in web browser.

And GPRS showed up in 2000/2001 and was arguably the real beginning of mobile data.

This is why I said "modern smartphone". The windows mobile phones were always a niche product for tech-savvy people and the blackberry was always highly optimized for people who cared about being able to access email 24/7 for business reasons.

Opera mini existed for years before the iphone, and it's what gets used to browse the web on slow networks. I used to run it on a low end j2me phone in 2006, and it browsed the web just fine. I think "the modern smartphone" more than anything is a change in perception of what is possible, no an actual meaningful increase in what is possible.

My 2007 Nokia N95 was in many ways way ahead of the 2008 iPhone with a 5mp camera (zeiss), front-facing camera, video calling, MMS, 3.5" headphone jacket, cut&paste "technology", GPS, FM radio, Adobe Flash support (gasp), 8GB storage, and many more things. I was streaming live footage online with Qik and uploading videos to YouTube while the iPhone couldn't even record video! It took Apple several years to catch up with some of these features. This phone was a beast but the only thing it didn't have was a great UI/UX.

So yes, the iPhone doesn't even come close to the birth of the smartphone, but it did a whole lot to make it main stream.

"the only thing it didn't have was a great UI/UX"

I have a Nokia N86 (about the same age as the iPhone), and while its specs were great, the software was light-years behind (especially web browsing).

How can you call people getting access to technology for the first time "stagnation"? It's the exact opposite of that. Here's Ray Kurzweil showing a graph from 1800 till recently that demonstrates how technology has had a direct effect on the wealth of the nations and on the average "conditions of living" for everyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4&feature=youtu...

Also a relevant bit from Louis CK on how we take technology for granted at every step:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/so_amazing_bu...

longer audio version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk

>We marvel at our smartphones, but so what. They make them in china for $50.

look at those stupid roses, I bet they're cheap to produce and they're hardly the best thing I've ever smelled. I've seen award winning roses on the internet, your roses are unimpressive.

They make them in china for $50

Anybody who stops to think about it for a little while probably marvels far more at the technology and innovation that actually makes it possible to build such a device for a mere $50.

It's not the technology and innovation. It's the lax environmental regulations and labor arbitrage.

"labor arbitrage"? You're saying it isn't fair because the middle income country selling phones to the low income country isn't paying money for high income workers instead? I can sort of understand why someone could think that it's good that phones sold in a country are made in that same country, but insisting that all phones sold everywhere be manufactured in the first world just exhibits a breathtaking sense of entitlement.

I'm saying that the real cost of the phone, in human and ecological factors, is much greater than $50.

And wouldn't they have to make them for much less than $50 if they are selling them for that much?

Yup, I should have written make them for a price where they can sell them for $50.

I'm not sure this is the conclusion that I would draw. It appears you're measuring technological progress by the gap between what is available in the 3rd world vs. what is currently available in the 1st world.

I would argue that making $50 phones is an amazing sign of progress as it speaks to just how amazing the technology behind manufacturing has got.

In fact, it has almost been a side effect of Moore's Law (almost the de-facto measure of technological progress in the CPU space for a while) that processors have become cheaper as they became faster.

Just like obesity has become a major problem, I wonder what other blight will be wrought on the second and third billion by progress? My wife and I often close each others laptops or devices when we are doing a shared activity (e.g. watching a movie). We recognize we both might be a bit internet-addicted. We have a friend who has a strict "no computing devices in the living room" policy. I hope these problems don't go hand in hand with ubiquitous access.

Leave aside first billion people. The next 2-3 billion people on the planet now have access to a computer that can truly help them in their everyday activities.

That seems like a disruption. But then, getting a ticket booked through a friendly travel agent over phone is definitely easier and affordable than using smartphone and using self service - effectively takes more time.

Self service is a compulsion in developed world due to play of economics.

Self-service indicates that staff income is high; it's either self-service, or increase prices to the customers, which in turn lowers availability of the service and overall lowers income. etc.

Mister. Mo from mobility blog based in Nigeria gives his analysis on when android will take over the Nigeria market.

http://mobility.com.ng/when-will-nigeria-become-an-android-m...

I totally agree with him.

What's the disruption? What are the possibilities? At least, what model are we talking about?

The disruption is that millions of Africans will be getting their first "computers" for $50, and these computers run the open source Android OS.

I believe it's this model or a variation of it: http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_u8150_ideos-3513.php

Obviously it's not much, but these smartphones are getting into dumbphone territory, and are going to all but wipe out the Symbian dumphone market in these developing markets, much like it's already happening in China and India.

Next year's Cortex A7, which has Cortex A8 performance (2010 flagship chip) and much lower price, being 5x smaller[1] in size (the CPU core itself), and the fast Jelly Bean OS should greatly improve the experience of such low-end smartphones going forward.

[1] http://images.gizmag.com/hero/arm-cortex-a7-biglittle.jpg

> I believe it's this model or a variation of it: http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_u8150_ideos-3513.php

From the specs:

> Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo)

It just won't die...

Argh! So annoying to see a whole new crop of devices launching with 2.x. Is 4.x that much more resource intensive or what?

Yes -- at a minimum you need something like 4x RAM, IIRC.

Yes, it is a bit, but not like iOS6 would run much better on these devices anyway. If the new chips can use some decent GPU's the experience should be significantly better on ICS/JB than on Froyo, though, because the UI wouldn't use so much CPU time anymore, and wouldn't choke as much doing regular operations.

You need 768MB of RAM for Android 4, and realistically a decent GPU. 256MB and the most basic $0.50 ARM chipset from Qualcomm [1][2] will get you up and running on Android 2.x.

1 - http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=cpu&id=a7225&c=qualcomm... 2 - http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/576095640/MSM7225.html

Of the Android devices that have access the Google Play store in the last 14 days, Google reports that 10% are running Froyo and another 4% are running a version older than Froyo. However, I imagine the number of Froyo devices is even higher if you include crappy devices that do not use Google's Play store.

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

More telling to me is a browse through the smartphone section in big Tokyo electronics store.

There are probably on the order of 30-40 different models, and I'd say at least half say "OS: Android 2.0"... :(

[Those are typically older models, of course, but with new phone models released constantly, the oldest are not more than about 1 - 1.5 years old. Also, some of the models I saw running 2.0 looked pretty up-to-date hardware-wise. It seems manufacturers are not always so keen to use the newest OS version...]

If android 4.4 could run on 256 RAM then Froyo will die instantly

No amount of efficiency in a new version will instantly get all the old devices upgraded. Froyo will live as long as most devices it came preinstalled on.

Might be the U8230, slightly better features

http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Huawei-U8230_id5625

Figured it out from this screencap http://i.imgur.com/McJSj.jpg

compare: http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/29267-large/Huawei...

Maybe the M835 http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Huawei-M835_id5204

because of the smaller top margin, but the buttons aren't shiny on the M835 http://i.imgur.com/Monkf.jpg

240 x 320 is far too low resolution for anything though

The main thing they get access to is the Internet. That's a massive thing right there.

When women basket weavers in rural Peru had access to SMS, they were able to cut out the middleman to sell their products. They got better prices and was able to communicate directly with the people that would sell their products.

Now imagine a smartphone, access to vast knowledge. So many more possibilities than a feature/SMS phone.

Internet access. That's the killer app for smart phones.

The $50 smart phone may have 3g internet capability but do the networks in sub saharan africa have reliable 3g coverage. For me in my part of africa the answer is no.

William Kamkwamba was 14 and living in Malawi when he built a windmill out of scrap parts based on a design he found in an old textbook.

Here is a quote from an interview[1] with him:

"So, when Tom told me I could find any information on the Internet, the first thing I did was search Google for windmills. I was amazed that I could find pictures and information — even instructions about how to build windmills. When I built my windmill I just used a book with pictures! I was amazed. Everything I needed to learn had been hidden in the Internet the whole time!"

Here is his TED talk about building the windmill:

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_t...

1 - http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/23/how_my_windmill/

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