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3.2" display. Weighs 100g. Cheap (presumably)

The little print at the end says "Currently only available in India."

Reminds me a bit of HMD's KaiOS feature phones but this is apparently Android?

It says "Small phone".

And it is indeed smaller than most smartphones. Apple never made a small smartphone, presumably because they need the big screen for their vending-machine-in-your-pocket to sell more content.

₹4,199 it seems, which is about $45.

You know it's an India focused device when the top selling point is "I've been looking for a burner phone for when I'm in Guayaquil. Something I wouldn't mind losing in a robbery." ;)

Could do alright in Australia and the UK for about 6 months of the year as well. ;)

But smartphones especially Chinese ones are so abundant in India, literally no one wants to buy this slop device. They socialize, watch TV, share through other internet medium to get cricket scores.

CPU: single A7, 1GHz

RAM: 64MB LP-DDR2

Flash: 128MB NAND

I think the OS is an update of the Mocor RTOS by the SoC vendor Unisoc.

I am curious if there are 3rd party apps on this device. If nothing else, it would be a fun challenge to write apps for something constrained like this.

Unfortunately, the camera is the one place they always cut very hard. It gets to the point that it would probably best to have nothing at all.

> Without WhatsApp support it will not go far.

Speaking of which, it is bizarre how the tables have turned. Whatsapp used to support everything under the sun... But now it is all Android and iPhone

Saar we need only near no far

They could do Telegram at least, which has a non-zero user base (not sure about India, though, which seems to be their target market), and supports third party clients. Rolling their own chat app is... well, good luck with that.

There looks to be an express chat app for iPhone and Android as well.

I assure you it can do regular calls and texting on the public telephony grid.

Even now, there's been a market for them. I know a few older people who have them

It seems particularly similar to the short lived Microsoft Kin phones from 2010.

My guess is because this is not an Android phone and it is important to be able to chat with Android and iPhone users. The real question is why would iPhone and Android users install this app?

https://www.hmd.com/en_in/about-hybrid-phones

Edit: Requiring Google Play login to use this express chat app is pretty stupid in my opinion. Why do apps require Google Play login? Especially a Chinese app? I am on an Android phone with Google play. I am just not signed in to Google play. I installed this app with Aurora store. The app simply throws me back to Play Store which tells me to sign in. Why?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moon.expre...

A dedicated app that's only compatible with itself and only have miniscule install count means nothing. I tried downloading it and it only even support 4 countries prefix at the moment. It's also not that cheaper compared to "proper" smartphone from other brands in that area. Notebookcheck says it's launched with 3999 rupees while I see Itel Zeno 10 is just 4769 rupees. With India's unskilled labor minimum monthly wage about 20000 rupees I don't think anyone would care about the price difference.

Reminds me a lot of my old Nokia 525 with windows. Great form factor for running and hiking. If this one got GPS I would buy it. But it's up against excellent full function phones like bluebox and veelo from China which make stunningly good small phones.

Which is now KaiOS by the way.

Think of it as the front cam you need to make video calls ... I think the bezels is so that the corners of the phone doesn't poke you when you keep it in your pocket (it's a small device - smaller than even feature phones).

The linked page says that it can be a hotspot.

After GSM and UMTS shutdown, LTE is the foundation for IoT and entry level mobile connectivity. 5G RedCap coverage is not widespread enough and the chipset is not cheap enough.

Do you live in a 5G-only region? If not, what's the problem?

4G is currently the dominant mobile data network with the best coverage.

Did you mix up 4G with 3G/2G?

now you know how it feels to browse this site as a non-American

I suspected as much after their first use case for cloud services was cricket results.

Perhaps the limitation to whatever express chat is isn’t a dealbreaker in India.