"Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya?s telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS?s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies. Thanks to low-cost Androids, the geographically-untethered smartphone is here to stay, and it simply cannot be stopped."
http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-like-hotcakes-in-kenya-the-world-next/ good discussions can be found about this at: hacker news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2892031 tier: https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/pipermail/tier/2011-August/003045.html
