The feature phone is dead, long live the feature phone

There’s a mad scramble going on right now in Africa and it isn’t for raw materials. It’s for the mobile market.

I’ve just returned from a trip to Lagos, Nigeria and the thing that stunned me the most was how many mobile phones most people carry. The average was two. I saw some people with four, and others were sharing a single device, but the common thread was that people wanted to use their phones primarily for phonecalls and SMS-ing. Yes there’s a mobile Internet boom happening, but it’s all relative. Nigeria has a population of 170 million, and the largest mobile network operator, MTN, almost has more customers (±50 million) than my home country, South Africa, has people.

Many tout the smartphone as the new king of mobile in Africa but there are many problems that make this a fairly audacious claim.

Airtime

Airtime costs are an obstacle to smartphone adoption in Africa.The average South African has less than $10 per month for airtime. Data costs are dropping but we forget that in Africa most people user their mobile devices for phone calls and text messaging — not for data services, not for apps, and not for web browsing. Communication is key and it’s still a voice-first market.

Device

When 36% of Africans live on $1 a day or less it doesn’t matter if the latest, greatest, newest, smartest phone is $100 or less. Even if it’s $20, that equates to 20 days of earnings for 36% of the continent. The choice, in some cases, will literally come down to whether you want to eat for the next week or buy a $20 device.

Electricity

Something that is always overlooked is the cost of electricity. I met a lady in South Africa who marveled at my iPhone and wondered about the battery life. I told her that I charge it every night and she laughed at me.

She shares her electricity box with four other families, the equivalent of ten people. There is no way that four families sharing the cost of an electricity meter are going to allow an iPhone (or any touchscreen device that devours battery) to charge every single day. The cost as well as the inconvenience makes this impractical and highly unlikely.

This is why Nokia have come out with the Asha range of phones, one of which claims to have up to a 48-day battery life.

Network Coverage

As hard as the mobile network operators are working to blanket their markets with the fastest network possible, they are not doing it at a modern pace. It’s at a snail’s pace in most of Africa.

Angola had the world’s fastest-growing economy in 2012 and it were only supplied with 2G coverage in 2011. Granted, they now have access to LTE in some areas, but it’s a technology seeking an audience, not the other way around. In many places where I once thought the mobile Internet would revolutionise learning and change people’s lives, there isn’t even enough coverage to make a phone call.

Pass it on

Simply put, feature phones are not tossed out or destroyed when a user in Africa upgrades. This is mostly what happens in my world (and probably yours too if you’re reading this). I get an upgrade, I toss a phone out or stick it in a drawer somewhere. In my experience in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, phones are passed down, passed around, fixed, hacked and reworked whenever and wherever possible.

The smartphone market is growing but rest assured, the feature phone market is not shrinking. Don’t be misled and think the smartphone isn’t coming. It is. Just not as fast as some might think.