Companies are scrambling to develop products and operating systems for the developing world, but any old phone will do.
For some time now, smartphones have become tediously similar (see “The New Smartphone Incrementalism”). We’ve been to the glitzy U.S. launches—the Motorola Droids, the Nokia Windows phones, the iPhone 5, the Blackberry 10, and so on. Let’s face it: they are much the same. Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona was filled with the latest advances—but, again, these were at the margins.
The real interesting story is at the low-end: how to put mobile Internet in the hands of the world’s poorest two or three billion people. The next wave of innovation and the biggest impacts will come from their hands. As Manoj Kohli, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said today in Barcelona: “They are young and hungry to pick up the Internet faster than anyone else.”
To read the full, original article click on this link: Mobile World Congress and The World's Young and Hungry: Where Real Mobile Innovation Will Come From | MIT Technology Review
