Freedom 251, world's cheapest smartphone, launches in India for $5

Indian phone maker Ringing Bellslaunched a $5smartphonetoday, with huge customer demandpromptly crashing the little-known company's website hours afterthe phone went on sale.

The Freedom 251 was unveiled a day ahead of the launch andis being sold for 251 rupees ($5) a price that skepticssaid was far lower than what its components would cost.

The phone has a 4-inch display. The screen resolution isn't specified on the company'swebsite, but is being reported as 960 x 540, which wouldmakeit smaller and less sharp than most current generation smartphones available in North America.

It also has a relatively poor camera the rear camera is3 MP and its front camera is just 0.3 MP.

However, its power, storage and battery compare favourably to more expensive phones it has a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 1 GB RAM and 8 GB of storagethat's expandable to 32 GB with an SD card.And it has the same battery capacity as the iPhone 5, 1450 mAh.

It runs Android 5.1 Lollipop at a time when many new phones are starting to use Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest version ofGoogle'smobileoperating system.

The smartphone went on sale Thursday morning but the companylater stopped accepting orders after its website crashed. "Wehumbly submit that we are therefore taking a pause," it said inan apology to customers.

Ringing Bells, based in the Delhi satellite city of Noida,was set up only last year and the launch event for the new phoneon Wednesday night was attended by a senior leader from PrimeMinister Narendra Modi's party.

Company president Ashok Kumar Chadha said the Androidsmartphone would have pre-installed apps that tie into Modiinitiatives such as 'Make in India' and 'Clean India'.

"Let us see what can we do to bring about a real liberationof Freedom to all our brothers and sisters," he said in aspeech, referring to the name of the new phone to make a play onwords.

In its notice to customers the company said it was receiving600,000 hits per second on its website, although it did not sayhow many of those hits converted to real orders.

For comparison, Google processes an estimated 40,000 searchrequests per second.

India is Asia's fastest growing smartphone market with 103.6million smartphones sold in 2015. Most Indians still buy cheapsmartphones that cost less than $200.

Highly subsidized?

Although the company didn't discuss the economics behind theoperation, analysts questioned the business model.

"It looks like it's highly subsidized by the company andit's not clear how they plan to sustain this," said Tarun Pathak
an analyst with Counterpoint Technology Research.

Previous attempts at frugal engineering in India have notbeen very successful.

In 2008, Indian government announced a $10 laptop that endedup costing over $100 before it made it to market.

A $20 Androidtablet sold by Datawind, a company started by two brothers who grew up in Brampton, Ont.,failed to capture significant market share, despitea governmentsubsidy scheme.

First deliveries of the Freedom 251 phone are not expectedbefore the middle of the year, according to Ringing Bells.

• 6 affordable smartphones that don't require a pricey contract
• Raspberry Pi Zero $5 computer unveiled