Around the time, just before the COVID Pandemic in India, I was reaching home (Feb 26) in Bangalore and the founder of Sunblaze[1] was flying out. We were able to have an hour of dinner-meeting before he leave for Japan. We were to discuss the opportunity of partnering and helping Indians farmers with a phone that can be sold at the cost price of ₹2,500 (roughly $33 at today's conversion). It runs a modified variant of a prior version of Android.
This phone can be a really cheap minimal phone with some "Smartphone" features. I have a piece with me but I have not yet used it and will be given to the engineering team to play around test our apps for it.
I often wonder how much additional bang for buck these sorts of inexpensively-priced phones could get by also aiming at the tinkerer/maker market. Ecosystem fragmentation and staggering hardware competition doesn't really provide anyone the foundation to stably provide an Android-based, market-resilient hackable device akin to the Raspberry Pi, but different vendors have found interesting ways to differentiate what are ultimately low-end devices by providing hacker-friendly features. The general leading example is the PinePhone (https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/).
- The simplest thing would be unlocking the bootloader and documenting your support (warranty etc) position on the use of custom firmware.
- Next in complexity would be periodically releasing driver blobs for progressively newer Linux versions - this would enable the community to keep their devices on recent(ish) Android releases with slightly less effort on your end. Given your market positioning, I don't think it would be unreasonable to release firmware on a "it shouldn't brick anything but it is untested" basis - ie, the community is the QC :)
- [Resists making unrealistic source code noises :D]
- What would probably go down nicely is supplying your own high-res shots to iFixit. Bonus points if the device (or version 2... or 3) is actually easy to disassemble - probably a practical consideration given your market (and the fact that local labor may be cheaper than a new ~$35 device).
- This will probably wind up on the website sooner or later anyways, but in line with the previous point, a list of what's in the phone (ie, chip model numbers) would be nice to know. Right now I have no idea if the device has host-side USB, for example.
You might decide that the effort associated with pursuing all or any of these may mean straying from your current price targets. That's fine; I just have a bit of a penchant for hacker-enabling really inexpensive Android devices :)
NB. I can't see the yellow header text at the top of the page.
Here are my learnings from my brief interaction with the founder.
- He was very clear on an immediate goal. His current intention is not to make money from the sale of the phones.
- Viable Revenue streams are from a collaboration with third parties who wish to leverage his platform to plug in mostly educational material for farmers.
- He wants to work with other Startups, Companies, in AgTech and others working for farmers.
- He is not competing in a 'cheaper-phone' category but more of a 'content-platform' for farmers.
- We, at Sagri[1], give loans to farmers, who do not have access to institutional lenders (which is more than 50% of Indian Farmers). We rely on our (WIP) credit-score for farmers to disburse loans. We fast-track and doing a lot of manual (spreadsheet + pen-paper) to give loans to farmers, during this epidemic, when it is needed most.
- Our idea is to partner with Sunblaze and give the phones for free to farmers. Farmers, then, payback in installments along with our loan repayments.
- The phone is also not about anything nerdy cool stuff. They don't even care much about being cool but more on optimizing it to able to run at the most optimal way for the resource they have.
- Thanks for the website feedback. I believe they have it just for the sake of it. Once we partner, maybe, we will help them out with that. :-)
I have one of these and it actually works pretty well. It’s my “phone break” phone as it’s small enough that you don’t want to use it a lot but you can use it if you need to for Spotify, maps or whatever.
I bought a palm pre when I was in infantry school and learned a week later I'd be assigned to a unit in Okinawa Japan where the phone wouldn't work. Cool device though.
Yup, I dig this and I hope we see more of this as we enter another phase of mobile devices.
My iPhone 11, although a great phone, is unnecessary for me. I love its camera (for photos/FaceTime), everything else is superfluous. I am also terrified with dropping it.
