Thinking of buying Freedom 251? 7 reasons why you should not
For Rs.251, there are many
things you can buy. You can buy a cup of coffee at StarBucks, you can
buy a pint of beer, order a small Pizza Margarita from Dominos. But
Ringing Bells is offering you a full fledged Android smartphone called
the Freedom 251. If you were thinking that some unknown innovation was
heralded by Noida based Ringing Bells, which allowed it to price the
phone at a mere Rs.251
then there's another thing waiting for you. There's a lot of smoke
around the announcement of the phone and certainly there are credible
reasons, which suggest that you shouldn't even bother plunking down an
amount as trivial as Rs.251 on the device.
-
The biggest red flag was that the phone wasn't there at the event. Yes,
a couple of executives were carrying the phone and they were promptly
hounded by the media, but the phone wasn't on display anywhere. If this
was the unveil for the world's cheapest smartphone, then the main
protagonist of the movie was a no-show.
- The operation of Ringing
Bells is seemingly clouded. It's a company which has popped out of
nowhere. It has a small office in Noida's sector 63, which by the way,
was deserted on the day of the launch.
The guards didn't let us in, and one fears that a Pandora's box
would've been opened if they did let us in on the day of the event.
-
Nothing is known about the promoters of the company. The Goel family,
which supposedly has over three decades of experience in the
agri-commodities business is backing Ringing Bells with Mohit Goel as
the director and Ashok Chadha as the president. However, the name of
this three-decade old business is unknown. In fact, seemingly, pains
have been taken that their identity isn't revealed.
- The business model doesn't add up. Ashok Chadha claimed that the phone had a costed Rs.2,500 to make. With duty subsidies of 13.8 per cent, Ringing Bells cut the cost by around Rs.500. By forgoing third party distributors for a online sales only model, it saves another Rs.480
claims Chadha. Lastly, its main trump card is economies of scale
unknown to any brand perhaps Apple. The company plans on manufacturing
the phone in 5 factories over the year, with capacities of 5 lakh units
per month. Initially, it will begin with two factories, but even that
gets it a reduction of only Rs.500, which still means that phone costs Rs.1,000 to make.
-
The company claims that it will allow other companies to use its
e-commerce platform to make up that amount, but if you see the state of
its website, then you'll understand its not feasible. It site kept
crashing before the books started and as of now the company has
shuttered bookings for the phone.
- The phone is a repurposed Adcom Ikon 4, which is available on Flipkart for Rs.4,081.
In fact, some tech websites, which have received the phone have
received units with the Adcom branding on it covered with a whitner
hilariously.
- Finally, it also told Hindustan Times
that the UI was ripped off from Apple's iOS, because Apple doesn't
have the copyrights for them. That's a pill too harder to swallow. If
this phone becomes popular by some chance there's no way the folks from
Cupertino will look the other way. Apple is a powerful company, perhaps
the most powerful one around. Yesterday, it had the gall to take on the
US government, it has taken Samsung to the Supreme Court in the US, it
will not lie still if some company rips off its user interface
blatantly.
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