I find it quite condescending and patronizing to assume a forty year old farmer who has not used a smartphone before has no possible use for it. My old man uses a GPS phone to calculate rough acreage of a Shamba he has been Contracted to farm or bale hay or whatever. He cares not if it is running android or symbian but it solves a real problem. He had issues with losing contacts or running out of space to store numbers. Now they back up online. How it happens is irrelevant to him, but he is happier and more productive as a result. Twinsims are not new tech but it is possible it is true they were refining their tech to serve rural folk. The problem is the sweeping statements of Kenyans being dirt poor and Nokia being the saviour it is has swooped in to save the situation. That being said am sure they have done their research and know exactly what they are doing. On 9/3/11, Rad! <conradakunga@gmail.com> wrote:
Folks, not everyone surfs facebook and uses twitter and reads blogs on their phones! Disabuse yourselves of the notion that the usage of mobile telephony in the yuppie generation is representative of the masses!
Go up country and find out what folks there are using their phones for. Calls. SMS. MPesa.
This is a HUGE market with unique needs.
In fact if i were Nokia i would stop fooling around with half baked smartphones and concentrate entirely on this sector.
-- Regards, Mark Mwangi http://mwangy.posterous.com