#nointernet

De wereld die nog zonder internet leeft.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Africa, which has the world’s lowest share of people using the internet, under 25%. The cohort of 800 million offline people spread across the continent’s 54 countries is younger and growing faster than most, but incomes are lower and a larger share of residents live in rural areas that are tough to wire for internet access—or, for that matter, electricity. Now, however, a handful of phone purveyors are trying in greater earnest to nudge internet-ready upgrades into African markets, with models designed with an eye toward rural priorities (first those of rural India, where they’re already hits), rather than battered thirdhand flip phones from the heyday of the Spice Girls.

STYT_PHONE-8-CMS
KaiOS phones put smartphone brains in longer-battery-life bodies.SOURCE: KAIOS
Two of the biggest mobile phone operators in Africa, MTN Group Ltd. of South Africa and France’s Orange SA, this year started selling quasi smartphones for as little as $20. Previously the floor had been around $40, well out of reach for many people. These devices, which have a smartphone brain in the body of 1990s candy bar phones, are powered by software from KaiOS Technologies Ltd., a three-year-old spinoff of a Chinese electronics giant that picked up the pieces from a failed effort to produce cheap internet devices.

Most companies are trying to make internet-connected devices ever more powerful and capable, but KaiOS went the other way. It rethought everything to keep the essential capabilities of smartphones but strip out costs and preserve battery life for people who likely have spotty access to electricity. MTN said in a statement that its KaiOS phones are designed to pull down barriers to the internet’s benefits. Bertrand Gouze, a vice president for Orange’s operation in Africa and the Middle East, says the KaiOS devices offer an .....

#nointernet  De wereld die nog zonder internet leeft. Nowhere is that clearer than in