Ex-Apple CEO Backed Obi Worldphone Launches Budget Android Phones
Originally published at www.lmt-lss.com.
The budget Android phone market is all set for an overhaul with the launch of two new phones from Obi Worldphone, a company backed by Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley.
The $199 Obi Worldphone SF1 and $129 SJ1.5 are the two latest budget Android phones that will be launched by the company and will be available at retail stores by October this year.
The Android 5.0.2 Lollipop-powered phones are designed by San Francisco-based Ammunition Group, the same design house that created Beats By Dre headphones. The custom user interface called Obi Lifespeed, also designed by Ammunition, is heavily inspired by the Beats Music app.
In the promo video, Sculley says, “We have no compromise in our cameras, Dolby-quality sound — all the things people expect at the high end, delivered at the greatest possible value.”
The SF1 has a 5-inch IPS display with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor, 2GB of RAM for the 16GB storage model, 3GB of RAM for the 32GB storage model, a microSD card slot (expandable up to 64GB), Dolby Audio Surround Sound 7.1, dual-SIM card slots and a 3,000 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery with QuickCharge 1.0.
The SF1 16GB and 32GB variants will be priced at $199 (approx. Rs. 13,000) and $249 (approx.Rs. 16,500) respectively. The Obi Worldphone SJ1.5, on the other hand, will be available at a suggested retail price of $129 (approx. Rs. 8,500).
The cameras also look promising with a 13-megapixel camera with LED flash on the back and 5-megapixel secondary camera on the front. The back camera uses a Sony image sensor, similar to the one used in the OnePlus 2’s camera.
One of the unique design features of the phone is the screen, which is elevated from the rest of the phones’s body and could make for an interesting user experience.
The SJ1.5 is the cheaper sibling of the SF1 and it only supports 3G and not 4G LTE. It’s also got a 5-inch screen, but at a lower resolution of 1,280 x 720 and it’s not elevated.
The specs aren’t great either. It gets a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD card up to 32GB), dual micro-SIM card slots and a 3,000 mAh battery. The SJ1.5 has an 8-megapixel camera on the back with LED flash and a 5-megapixel camera on the front.
The company has announced that the smartphones will be initially available in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and India. The company has set a target to make the SF1 and SJ1.5 smartphones available in 50 to 70 countries by 2017.
