$80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?

It seems like just yesterday when only the slickest kid on the block had a smartphone, but now, this revolutionary gadget is selling like hotcakes in the developing world. Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya’s telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies. Thanks to low-cost Androids, the geographically-untethered smartphone is here to stay, and it simply cannot be stopped.

So how did Huawei ride the demand curve below the golden price point, bringing an Android phone within the financial reach of thousands of Kenyans? Alongside the falling cost of all microelectronics, it appears that Huawei was able to lower the price by using less powerful hardware...