Abstract
Until recently, the only way for the population of developing countries to access the Internet was through expensive smartphones, designed in and for developed countries. In the past few years, however, a major new innovation has emerged, the smart feature phone with Internet connectivity, which was specifically designed for those with low incomes in developing countries. This chapter explains the development process for the smart feature phone, how this has influenced the nature and extent of adoption, and its use by low-income groups, including their demonstrated preference for uses related to entertainment rather than more traditional ‘work-related’ goals. The focus is on the case of India, where the JioPhone has already reached millions of people with low incomes.
This chapter originally appeared as “The smart feature phone revolution in developing countries” in The Information Society, 36(4).
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Notes
- 1.
Singer (1970) referred to this as international technological dualism.
- 2.
- 3.
For a review see James (1989).
- 4.
On the general problems of scaling up, see Hartmann and Linn (2008).
- 5.
See the ILO’s (International Labour Organization) own description of the program (ILO 1992).
- 6.
For a description of the case, see Singh and Pandey (2005).
- 7.
See for example the data in Table 2.1.
- 8.
Other important ones, for example, are the availability of infrastructure and digital skills.
- 9.
This was also the case with basic phones as shown empirically by Waverman et al. (2005).
- 10.
The idea has also been applied to education by Michaelowa (2001).
- 11.
According to the World Bank (2017), for example, “More than 80 percent of the entire working age population in Ghana and more than 60 percent in Kenya cannot infer simple information from relatively easy texts.”
- 12.
Note, though, the caveat noted above to the effect that it is still not known what percentage of the poor actually adopt the new phones. More generally, the benefits of the Internet in developing countries are described in numerous sources such as Deloitte (2014).
- 13.
I showed that the text to speech application on the JioPhone reduces the need for literacy among the poor who are unable to reach minimum levels of this capability.
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James, J. (2020). The Smart Feature Phone Revolution in Developing Countries: Bringing the Internet to the Bottom of the Pyramid. In: The Impact of Smart Feature Phones on Development. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62212-1_2
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