Ringing Bells is a tech brand in India that recently announced plans to release a smartphone to the public at a price point of only $4. Many analysts and consumers suspected some kind of pyramid scheme or publicity hoax, but now the Freedom 251 smartphone has been confirmed as a real thing, with the first shipment of nearly 200,000 smartphones happening at the end of this month.
Buyers of the Freedom 251 get a genuine, if modestly featured, smartphone for their four American dollars, with a four-inch screen, a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, a gigabyte of memory, front and rear-facing cameras, and an Android 5.1 OS that runs the whole thing. Interestingly, Ringing Bells is selling the phones at a loss, but the company’s CEO reportedly hopes to achieve a profit margin by selling a massive volume of the unbelievably inexpensive smartphones.
It doesn’t look like the Freedom 251 is quite ready for a worldwide roll-out, but you can read up on its release in India right here. And if this business model is a success, you can expect the Samsung Brnr to come to a store near you pretty soon.