New Delhi, Ringing Bell: This year in February 2016 Ringing Bells Freedom 251 Smartphone was launched with much fanfare, as the name suggested the cost of the smart phone was 251 Rs itself. There were lakhs and lakhs who booked this phone thinking cheaper and handy android application.

You might be one of them who booked this Smartphone with a promise and expectation to get soon, this article is for you as well.

Launch Affair, sweet: Launched in February 2016. The phone comes with a 4.00-inch touch screen display with a resolution of 540 pixels by 960 pixels. This phone was published and promoted as the cheapest Smartphone in the world

Specification Affair: Too Tall promise

The Ringing Bells Freedom 251 is powered by 1.3GHz quad-core it comes with 1GB of RAM. The phone packs 8GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 32GB via a microSD card. As far as the cameras are concerned, the Ringing Bells Freedom 251 packs a 3.2-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 0.3-megapixel front shooter for selfies.

Lost Love, no where to find:

  1. The promise of delivering nearly 200,000 Freedom 251 handsets" has fallen flat and most people who booked the handset are yet to see one.
  2. After announcing that it has delivered 5,000 Freedom 251 smartphones in July (did not met someone having the smartphone or using it for their daily purpose), Ringing Bells Pvt Ltd said it would deliver 65,000 more to those who had booked the device in cash on delivery (COD) mode.

Never After that, any further information has been shared and it appears the initial hype has fizzled out. The company has since forayed into making TVs and other smart phones, absolutely no news of the Freedom 251 dream.

And looks like the company has cheated the people of 251 Rs from their pocket. Anyone having knowledge on mobile and devices and a wise man would never have bought a Smartphone giving promise of selling a Smartphone for just 251 RS, it is just like the politicians who promise the moon just before the election and never deliver what they have promised, said Ankit, senior analyst at a software firm.

The company in mid-February this year had planned to deliver 2.5 million handsets before June 30. Ringing Bells received mammoth -- over 70 million -- registrations before its payment gateway crashed.

Last six months have been phenomenal as we have reached 200 cities with a distributor network of 230. In this period, we have been able to widen our product base, including high-end mobiles and televisions. This year, we have sold 150,000 products and expect to get a 25 per cent increase in the coming months," the spokesperson said, declining to be named and without mentioning Freedom 251.

Looks like the company after taking the money from the customers is now unable to commit to the earliar expectations, it is now looking for government help to achieve this. As per IANS Ringing Bells CEO Mohit Goel said if the government was willing to dole out Rs 50,000 crore (about $7.5 billion), he can ensure that 750 million of our population would become part of digital India by owning a smartphone at Rs 251.

"The government can make the phone -- under our Freedom brand -- from some other vendor. I have no objection to it. To make such phone for every Indian citizen, the government needs to allocate funds from its Digital India initiative," Goel had said.

False Hopes:

According to Parv Sharma, Research Associate at New Delhi-based Counterpoint Research, Freedom 251 raised false hopes in the people about owning a cheap smartphone.

With Inputs from: http://www.news18.com

About The Author

Chetan Sharma is an Indian fact-checker and news writer, writing news for Ayupp since 2014.

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