Last night, lesser-known phone company Ringing Bells launched the world’s cheapest smartphone, the Freedom 251, at just Rs. 251. The phone went on sale earlier today at 6AM, but when we attempted opening the website at 6:21AM, we were redirected to some other website. We closed and attempted to reopen, but the site was down. Luckily, our browser history showed the redirected URL and on opening it, you can see why the images were quite shocking. We attempted to open the website second time at around 7AM, and found that it was down. Here is the screenshot of the first attempt. For many potential buyers who woke up early and were to trying to get through the registration process, it was probably not a 'good' morning.
https://twitter.com/BabuMoshaaye/status/700115262729801729
We tried opening the website for the third time at 8:30AM and found that it has been restored, and is working fine at the moment. However, we still have readers tweeting to us that they are facing trouble while registering. As of now, we don’t have an official word on what happened earlier this morning.
To recall, the Ringing Bells Freedom 251 features a 4-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 960x540p. Powering the phone is a 1.3GHz quad-core SoC. It has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. It supports microSD cards of upto 32GB. The phone also sports two cameras, a 3.2MP camera at the back, and a 0.3MP camera on the front. Freedom 251 uses a 1450mAh battery. It is a single SIM phone and comes with connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and FM. Check out our first look at the smartphone below.