Gadgetory

give them $4 smartphone sounds too good to be true guess what it is I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNET update a phone should not be the same price as a cup of coffee but one new smartphone maker in India is getting lots of attention this week for introducing an Android phone that only costs about four dollars it's the freedom 251 and it's called 251 because in India it costs 251 rupees which comes to three dollars and 70 cents here but when you look closer at the facts around this phone things start to get super shady and it's clear something is not right for starters the company ringing bells says it's made in India but is in fact made in China when the phone was unveiled at a press event reporters were given sample phones that had the Chinese brand addcom covered in white out you can see the paint scratched off here in this video from the business news paper mint in which the reporter also said she had trouble getting the review model to turn on and photos from various news outlets all show icons on the home screen that look like they were ripped off from Apple's iPhone app icons India's telecom ministry is investigating this company and how it could possibly sell a phone for so cheap because when you just break down the cost of the parts that are being imported from China it costs about $40 to make freedom 251 is marketed to have a 4-inch display a 1.3 gigahertz quad-core processor and 8 gigs of storage running Android lollipop the BBC and others report that the company does not yet have a manufacturing center in India and yet this made in India foam promises to start shipping pre-orders by the end of June the website crashed Thursday from pre-orders and the company told The Economic Times of India that it had 30,000 orders already for the phone before the site went down yeah we shall have to see how this plays out in the meantime there are some other unique phones popping up that aren't so shady but they don't come as cheap take the next bit Robin this comes from a brand new company and to stand out it took a new approach to storage it comes with 32 gigs but to save room it will automatically archive apps and photos that you have not used and store them in next bit servers online yes the cloud you redownload them when you need them the fingerprint sensor to unlock the phone is on the power button on the side and in our time with it we found it to work very well but it is not a perfect phone it costs 400 dollars unlocked and Caterpillar yes the construction brand has a new ultra rugged phone called the s60 and is the first with thermal imaging sensor built into the camera it comes out this year for $600 and it's one of many phones that will be unveiled at the big mobile show taking place in Barcelona Mobile World Congress will be bringing you tons of news in the mobile world over the next few days so stay tuned using it for continuing coverage from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey