Africa is one of the fastest growing mobile technology markets in the world. A bunch of mobile phone makers have introduced Windows Phone 8 handsets in the continent at various price points.
But there still is a very large market for affordable devices sporting Microsoft’s latest mobile OS.
Microsoft, aware of this fact, has partnered with Huawei to introduce a new Windows Phone designed especially for Africa, called 4Afrika, undoubtedly part of Microsoft’s 4Afrika initiative.
Huawei, as you may recall, recently joined the Windows Phone party with the most affordable handset so far, the Ascend W1. The Huawei 4Afrika is a variant of Ascend W1, targeted towards students, businesses, developers and first time smartphone owners across the African continent.
This was announced in a post on the official Windows Phone blog. Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International noted:
“We believe there has never been a better time to invest in Africa and that access to technology—particularly cloud services and smart devices—can and will serve as a great accelerator for African competitiveness.”
As far as specification go, this new smartphone packs quite a punch. A 4-inch WVGA (800 x 400 pixels) display keeps things nice and bright, and a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor speeds the experience. 4GB of internal storage and a massive 420 hours standby time complete the vital stats.
At the end of the day, this is a custom phone for the continent, and like all things custom, Redmond has preloaded it with special apps created by African developers for local consumers. It even comes with a market-specific store (within the larger Windows Phone Store, of course) for downloading local content.
The phone is set to launch later this month in seven countries — Angola, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa — and will come in blue, red, black and white versions.
All Comments
Well, i was at the laucnh of 4Afrika in Ivory Coast. The event was quite boring and i am not that excited by the device. However, i will test it before having a final judgement on it and the price seems to be very, very reasonnable. Moreover even i prefer phablet, especially Galaxy Note series, and i am egearly waiting for full hd 5″ smartphone as my main phone, it could be interesting to have this phone as a second or third phone.
But i am a power user so i can be quite subjective.
Well, it’s a start. 🙂 Agree about the full HD 5-inchers. My next purchase is going to be that one, finally some sense prevailing with regards to resolution and screen sizes.