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The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana
- hucker 11y agoThis phone looks really interesting as a backup/utility, especially for people who travel a lot with many sim cards from different countries... Has anyone found somewhere to order internationally? EDIT: Specifically that exact design, there's something about it..
- kens 11y agoIf you find how to get one of these phones, let me know. I'd like to do a teardown.
- userbinator 11y agoAlibaba/Aliexpress would be the place to go for this and other unbranded feature phones.
- equartey 11y agoHey there - I'm the author of the power bank phone article. It looks like local retailers are unwilling to ship it internationally. Kindly let me know if you'd like me to get it and courier it to you: equartey at gmail.
- andor 11y agoThe WhatsApp client is not official or licensed, I guess? I wonder how WhatsApp deals with such third-party clients that end up with a large user base?
- captainmuon 11y agoIt might be the WhatsApp java client (J2ME?). At least in the beginning, WhatsApp made a point of being available on as many different devices as possible, including low-end feature phones (java based, symbian, etc.).
- andyjohnson0 11y agohttp://blog.textit.in/your-path-to-a-$16b-exit-build-a-j2me-app http://blog.textit.in/your-path-to-a-$16b-exit-build-a-j2me-...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 11y agoThis is likely a truly unbranded OEM feature phone based on a Mediatek or Spreadtrum reference platform. Resellers then add their own branding to it. I couldn't find that exact one but a bit of searching turns up similar models: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/9000mAh-long-standby-power-bank-torch-TV-FM-voice-king-Vibration-Dual-SIM-cards-waterproof-cell/32303218550.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/9000mAh-long-standby-power-ba... http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-H-mobile-X8-4-SIM_60202719353.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Original-H-mobile-X8-4... http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Original-Xiaocai-X6-Phone-With-Power-Bank-Dual-SIM-Card-Senior-Flashlight-Big-Speaker-1-8Inch/302720_32217997305.html http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Original-Xiaocai-X6-... It is a bit surprising at first to see such enormous feature phones still in mass production, but it makes sense that the conditions in developing countries would favour more rugged designs and versatile physical features; in that environment a thin touchscreen smartphone made of mostly glass and metal would be an overly fragile piece of kit with little advantage.
- Moru 11y agoNot to mention the stand-by time is usually enormously different...
- solidpy 11y agoThe main reason to use feature phones in my developing country is that they are not worth stealing.
- ThomPete 11y agoIs this something you have sources on or just an opinion? Would be interested in knowing.
- vorbote 11y agoHmmm... Very uninformed of you. Just walk into an alley at night in Manhattan or Chicago or Boston or Los Angeles or (surprise!) San Franciso and you'll know... Seriously, read the newspapers of any more or less poor third world country and you will find many notes about people mugged and killed, stabbed or shot to death, to steal them some US$75 chinese MediaTek shitphone you can find in Amazon. I'll give you some newspapers in Latin American cities that range from 6 to 25 million inhabitans: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/ http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/ http://www.eluniversal.com/ http://www.eluniversal.com/ http://www.clarin.com/ http://www.clarin.com/ http://www.eltiempo.com/ http://www.eltiempo.com/ http://oblobo.globo.com/ http://oblobo.globo.com/ http://www.folha.com/ http://www.folha.com/ As always, Google Translate is your friend.
- jdmitch 11y agoI just got back from Ghana, where I was evaluating an ICT in education project, and one of the people on the team that was implementing the project had this phone. At first I thought he just had an old phone, then I learned he had downgraded from a smartphone. Then I thought maybe he was doing it for ironic retro style points (which is not really "a thing" in rural northern Ghana in the way it is in London or New York). He did acknowledge a certain smugness about the "anti-style." At the end of the day, it seemed like the practical durability and the long battery life were the clinchers for his decision to "downgrade".
- keithpeter 11y agoWhat was the call quality like? I'd imagine fairly good simply from the better microphone placement given the size of the thing. PS: My old Blackberry can do 2.5+ days on a charge since I mashed the earphone socket and can't use it to listen to music. The music application seems to drain the battery for some reason.
- OliverJones 11y agoIt helps to be reminded that wireless tech is a great enabler for the developing world. I wonder if the entrepreneurs who rent solar-powered lamps also rent batteries for these phones? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-steve-israel/roll-back-the-darkness-in_b_230935.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-steve-israel/roll-back-the...
- shubhamjain 11y agoI think being a power bank + a phone is the major reason why it is getting so much attention - "Hey, I ought to buy a power bank, so why not this one which will give phone features too." Considering that the cost of this phone is almost equal to a good power bank, people would definitely chose this over others. I think this is an awesome example of giving something + some additional features equating to viral growth, even if the other features are not that good. Do we have an equivalent of that in software world?
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- dokument 11y agoWell you do have the shipping issue in the US. You wouldn't be able to ship those phones by themselves (without it being a very large box) much less multiple phones in one shipment.
- mangecoeur 11y agoBatteries that last a week would be nice in current markets too! Not just emerging ones. I personally still don't understand how flagship phones costing $100s barely make it through the day but still get rave reviews. I can't count the number of times Galaxy and iphone touting friends have become unreachable in the evenings because of this - I would have trashed those in a review, who cares about fancy features if you can't even call your friends on a night out because the battery doesn't make it past 10pm...
- antimagic 11y agoI recently went camping in an area where there was no data reception. My iPhone 6+ still had 17% battery left after 5 days of using it like a normal phone (voice and SMS). Smartphones have short battery life because we do so much more with them. I'm sure those friends of yours could have made their phones last through to the end of the evening by switching off data once they hit 30% battery, but they preferred to have access to all that functionality that data provides, knowing there was a risk of running out of charge. The point being, people have the power to make that choice with their current hardware, and they vote overwhelmingly to accept the lower battery life for higher functionality tradeoff.
- frandroid 11y agoI remember once when I was roaming at exhorbitant cost, I was regularly turning off data to save money and my battery life was greatly improved. I wish I could have finer control on the polling frequency and volume of most apps...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 11y ago>> "Has built-in FM radio" Technically, your phone does, too, but access to it has been blocked. http://freeradioonmyphone.org/ http://freeradioonmyphone.org/
- Piskvorrr 11y agoTechnically, all of my smartphones so far have a working FM radio app preinstalled (I'm in EU). Is this block some US thing?
- efraim 11y agoGoogle Nexus phones doesn't come with FM radio in EU. I think all HTC, Samsung, Sony etc does.
- pmontra 11y agoOld Galaxy S2 here. It has a FM radio, it uses the earplug cable as antenna but it can play through the speaker. Same thing for my older Nokia N70.
- userbinator 11y agoAccording to that link: wireless carriers are dragging their feet and won’t activate the FM chips that are in every smartphone So it's probably something similar to SIM-locking, and what happens if you buy a phone from a carrier. My experience has been the same with Asian no-name smartphones, in that they all come unlocked and with FM radio. The reference platform has the feature, and the manufacturers wouldn't bother removing it because doing so would mean extra work and one less bullet-point in the feature list.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoAha, thanks for the explanation.
- TrevorJ 11y agoI remember ten or so years ago being in Ghana and being amazed that after driving 3 hours to a remote village, the residents had better cell coverage than I had oftentimes stateside.
- vollmond 11y agoI worked with a guy from 2006-2009 who was retired USNavy. He said he always judged a country's infrastructure by whether all the natives drank bottled water and had cell phones -- it meant they didn't have the ability to build POTS infrastructure/water systems. Of course, he then gave a knowing look and applied the same metrics to the USA.
- jtchang 11y agoCan we talk about the Nokia 8210 candybar phones? Circa 1999 this thing was indestructible and had battery life that would probably outlast 3-4 iPhones. I think there is a market for these types of phones again. Even if it was ugly it was durable and functional. There is definitely a market for a phone that can be dropped and still function.
- Munksgaard 11y agoI just bought a Nokia 105 for about $16 after my 6320 finally died, and I'm quite happy with it. Battery lasts for ages, I'm not afraid to drop it, I don't get distracted by social apps and notifications all the time, and it just works.
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- _broody 11y ago> battery life that would probably outlast 3-4 iPhones. And functional life as well. iOS 8 crippled A5 devices which had previously chugging along quite decently. Planned obsolescence sucks (in iDevices' case, it also affects present performance, i.e. Safari constantly having to reload tabs because the device has little RAM to spare). Unlike a smartphone, a simpler device won't be reduced to be unable to perform its more basic functionality decently a few years down the road...
- mynameisvlad 11y agoYou don't have to upgrade to iOS 8. Similarly, the 8210 wouldn't have had software upgrades, which naturally would be geared towards newer devices and cause the device to also slow down.
- acdha 11y ago
- ghshephard 11y agoImpressive that it sells for $25 given that I just (yesterday) paid $60 for a Fujitsu MC700 10,400 mAh battery.
- ohitsdom 11y agoThe battery in this phone is only 1,000 mAh, so not that impressive really. Edit: my mistake, the phone is 10,000 mAh. Impressive indeed!
- ghshephard 11y agoCheck out: https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/powerbankphone4.jpg?w=1024 https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/powerbankphone4.j... It's 10,000 mAh.
- shkkmo 11y agoThat's not what the picture in the article shows. It shows 10000 mAh.
- fredsted 11y agoWell it certainly says that on the battery, but I really doubt has that much power in practice.
- p1mrx 11y agoUsing the USB port as a reference, the size of the battery pack is roughly 71mm x 35mm, so it probably contains two 18650 cells side by side. Panasonic's best 18650s have a capacity of 3350mAh, which sets an upper bound of 6700mAh for the pack: http://na.industrial.panasonic.com/products/batteries/rechargeable-batteries/lithium-ion/series/cylindrical-series/CS474 http://na.industrial.panasonic.com/products/batteries/rechar... Those "5000mAh" 18650s you find on eBay come from Chinese manufacturers who stick random numbers on cylinders, so the actual capacity is probably off by a factor of 3-5: http://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/UltraFire%20TR18650%205000mAh%20(Blue)%20UK.html http://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/UltraFire%20TR1865...
- leni536 11y ago
- higherpurpose 11y agoWait, so that "power bank" is only 1,000 mAh? I saw an Alcatel One Touch 20.01 "for seniors" recently that looked much better/slimmer yet still have a 1,000 mAh battery. It didn't cost much more than this. I think ~1,000 mAh is pretty typical for such a low-end feature phone.
- whyenot 11y agoIt's 10,000 mAh.
- Animats 11y ago10Ah, or 10,000mAh.
- URSpider94 11y ago10,000 mAh. You forgot a zero :)
- morganvachon 11y agoBLU is making a smartphone with a similar feature, the BLU Studio Energy. It's a large Android phone with a 5,000 mAh battery and it's designed to be used as a power bank for other phones. http://www.bluproducts.com/index.php/studio-energy http://www.bluproducts.com/index.php/studio-energy I've used a BLU phone before (the recently released Win HD LTE) and I wasn't impressed with the build quality; my phone suffered severe touch lag and an inexplicable lack of multi-touch capability, to the point that typing was impossible. It also suffered frequent stuttering and crashes that even my old Lumia 521 didn't have. I promptly returned it and went back to using Android for the time being, and now I'd hesitate to get another BLU. But the Energy does look like a nice concept.
- bernardlunn 11y agoCheap phone with built in reliable solar charger - please
- guelo 11y agoOne of the confusing things to me about the apparently competitive smartphone market is how little creativity there is in smartphone design. Why do we only get thin rounded rectangles? Seems like there would be a market everywhere for big thick indestructible smartphones.
- GFischer 11y agoCaterpillar sells some purportedly hardened android phones: http://www.catphones.com/phones/b15-smartphone/ http://www.catphones.com/phones/b15-smartphone/ http://www.catphones.com/phones/s50-smartphone/ http://www.catphones.com/phones/s50-smartphone/
- nodata 11y agoBecause it didn't really work out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 http://www.slipperybrick.com/2009/12/starfish-diamond-cell-phone/ http://www.slipperybrick.com/2009/12/starfish-diamond-cell-p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3600/3650 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3600/3650 http://www.gsmarena.com/toshiba_g450-2237.php http://www.gsmarena.com/toshiba_g450-2237.php
- fwr 11y agoIt's shocking that none of these forms ever caught on.
- bodo352 11y agoI worked on Siemens' Xelibri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xelibri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xelibri) brand of phones. The problem was the lack of usability studies or real technical innovation. We basically chopped up existing Siemens models and tried to squeeze them in a "cool" looking housing without causing to much retooling for the manufacturing people. Many of the examples you listed did the same. Different for the sake of being different doesn't work out.
- michaelbuckbee 11y agoI think it's because the thin rounded rectangle is the base model and then almost everybody gets a case to customize it to their needs. There's a half dozen options at every point on the ruggedness, battery life (I'm thinking of things like the Morphie power case), water resistance and price spectrum.
- nokya 11y agoI felt more concerned by the behavior of the Facebook and Whatsapp applications as the author described them. At first guess, the poor notification for new messages might reflect the absence of a proper multitasking OS. On the other side, chances for these applications to be legit seem quite low considering that nobody seems to have any clue where and by whom these phones are manufactured. This constitutes a big opportunity for a serious widespread scam scheme being built up (or already operational). Any security folks looking into it?
- gbl08ma 11y agoIt is probably using the official J2ME "apps" for Facebook and Whatsapp. I think it's about as dangerous as trusting any pre-installed app on feature phones and even smart phones. About the "absence of a proper multitasking OS", well, that's what many/most non-smart phones have even today. I think my first phone that supported J2ME software would not properly receive messages while the JVM was running, and the handling of phone calls was jerky. If you received a call the application/game would be terminated abruptly, causing any state to be lost. Yeah, that's how most phones worked ten years ago - forget any sort of background tasks, be them Java apps or music (MIDI!) playing. Not all phones were as bad, though: Symbian-based ones, for example had some sort of multitasking IIRC, but these also tended to be more expensive.
- plorg 11y agoOnly partially related, but I have a friend who carries around a comically-large 14000 mAh battery[0]. Comically large as in about the size of three or four iPhone 6s's stacked on top of each other - he wore it on a belt clip. My other friends and I made fun of him. He always had his ridiculously large, power-guzzling phone plugged into it. But he insisted that he had it because it could jump-start a car (he's a mechanic, but with no formal training and only a high school education, and he said he had never used the device himself). I and another friend, me with a masters degree in electrical engineering, and he with a PhD in an engineering field, thought the idea preposterous: Surely one could not draw enough cranking amps from such a device to start a car, and could it even hold enough energy to do so? I received, by way of my own carelessness, an opportunity to test this out when I found my car's battery dead one day in the middle of winter. My friend lent me his battery pack, and I set it up, leaving it connected to the car's battery for 30 seconds before attempting to start the car. Lo and behold, the car started. I felt chagrined, but I also thought this was really cool. With the price and availability of lithium batteries as they are, why _should_ you need a 50-100 lb lead-acid battery to jump start a car? Also, maybe I should learn a little more about cars. [0] I couldn't find the Amazon listing back, but this is in the same product category: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00D42AFS8 http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00D42AFS8
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoOn a car (at least an old one) the ridiculously robust lead-acid battery is used also to filter out spikes and to act as a voltage regulator. If you've ever wondered why the headlamps on a kick-start moped flicker while idling, that's what you get without using batteries as a filter. Li-ion wouldn't survive very long in this application AFAIK.
- bri3d 11y agoThere are plenty of replacement LiFePO4 auto batteries available, and they work very well without needing much in the way of support circuitry. I think that it's mostly cost keeping lead-acid around (as well as operating temperature range and lifetime), not that nothing is suitable for the application. The headlamps on a moped probably flicker because it uses a magneto instead of an alternator as its power source.
- hazz 11y agoThis is a repost, original article here: https://medium.com/product-notes/the-mystery-of-the-power-bank-phone-taking-over-accra-344adbb56919 https://medium.com/product-notes/the-mystery-of-the-power-ba...
- nickysielicki 11y agoI recently got rid of my Moto G in exchange for a $20 Nokia 208. It's been great. I can still call or text my friends when we're out and need to find each other. I'm not reading reddit everywhere I go. I can still do USB tethering with my laptop. It has an MP3 player built in, as well as a radio. It even has Opera Mini, which does well in a pinch for settling bets via wikipedia. The only thing I really miss is maps. But by far, the best part has been that it simply doesn't die. I charge it about every 4 days. It charges in an hour or less.
- dharma1 11y agoI carry 20,000mah anker in my bag most days. Charges 5-12v up to 3A, good stuff. Charges my blackmagic camera too
- shirro 11y agoI wouldn't mind downgrading to a feature phone that was mostly battery that had a minimal screen (watch sized) for power saving and was good for text, voice, tethering, music and gps logging and not much else. Then tether a 7" or bigger tablet sitting in the car or backpack for when I need the screen. Lugging around a huge, fragile, power hungry screen just to play music and receive texts and being tied to a charger is moving in the wrong direction for me.
- undertow 11y agoI seriously miss low-tech phones that are actually so low-tech and dumb that the only features they boast are the most practical necessities. The worst part about most phones of any era is that they become ruined with sinister bloatware, designed to funnel you into dark patterns of paying for garbage that burns any trust you might invest into a device, until it's a charred unregocnizable mess. Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.
- userbinator 11y agoUnfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house. You'd probably get a 32-bit ARM at a few hundred MHz, with several MB of RAM, like this: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107 I don't know if that counts as being minimal to you, but they're certainly not putting even low-end smartphone SoCs in these. Interesting that a low-end smartphone costs roughly the same, with all the smart features, but not as much ruggedness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9558854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9558854
- nnrocks 11y agoEven I would like to get this phone. It's awesome especially with battery.
- equartey 11y agoHey there - I'm the author of the power bank phone article. Kindly let me know if you'd like me to get it and ship it to you: equartey at gmail.