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Intel Yolo
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Intel *not* working on a cheap phone for South Africa

We like cheap phones, you like cheap phones, and that’s a good job, as the world is about to be overwhelmed by them. But for the time being, they won’t be coming with Intel processors inside – at least not in South Africa. We’ve seen sub-R1 000 ‘white labelled’ Intel smartphones such as the Yolo elsewhere in the continent – that launched with Safaricom in Kenya earlier this year – but they aren’t likely to arrive on our shores anytime soon.

That’s the word from Intel’s South African country manager, Videesha Proothveerajh, who in response to a question asked by htxt.africa in a press conference at the rAge expo earlier today, said the company isn’t currently in any negotiations or talks with local network operators, Vodacom, MTN, Cell C or Telkom Mobile about putting similar deals together.

That’s not great news for Intel’s progress in the smartphone space, since cracking the South African (and African) market will rely on it being able to get cheap, Intel based smartphones into the prepaid market, as has been illustrated by Samsung’s success at the entry level and Vodacom’s recent launch of the Vodafone Smart Mini.

Instead of trying to put together cheap white labelled phone deals with the operators, Proothveerajh said that Intel’s strategy for South Africa centres on working closely with its hardware partners to bring OEM branded products to market And right now, the products Intel focusing on most heavily are in the tablet and phablet space.

One vendor that has had some success with and Intel-based phablet is Asus, who says it’s achieved (in some cases) better traction with its Fonepad than what it had with its Nexus devices, through smaller players in the local mobile telco environment, such as Nashua Mobile and Telkom Mobile.

Local ASUS marketing exec, Judy Huang told us that the product had also achieved some encouraging traction at Massmart stores, who owns Makro, Game and Dion Wired. Huang says Asus is predicting that the traction for the upcoming Fonepad 2 is likely to be even more encouraging.

The only other Android and Intel-based device that’s available in South Africa is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, which runs an dual-core Intel Atom processor. Intel couldn’t tell us how that product has fared since its August release locally.

The news isn’t quite as bleak for some other African countries however. Proothveerajh said that the Nigerian market can expect the arrival of a Lenovo smartphone based on Intel technology early in next year. She did however say that to her knowledge, this product wasn’t slated for arrival in South Africa.

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