Remember John Sculley? He’s the man reowned for marketing your favorite Pepsi drink and ousting Steve Jobs out of Apple. Well, his new Indian-based smartphone company Obi has just announced two affordable handsets that look really good on first impressions. The names of the phones are named after Californian cities, SF1 for San Francisco and SJ1.5 for San Jose.
Obi is known for creating cheap Windows Phone handsets in India back then and the company is doing the same to its Android offerings. In terms of specs, the SF1 sports a 5-inch Full HD display with Gorilla Glass 4, a Snapdragon 615 SoC, available in 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage or 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage models, a 13-megapixel Exmor RS main camera and 5-megapixel front camera, and a 3000mAh battery. The SF1 also features some great features such as a ‘Chromaflash’ on the main camera that avoids washed out pictures upon when taking pictures with flash and comes with Dolby Audio Surround 7.1 whenheadphones are plugged in.
The SJ1.5 is the entry level model of the Worldphones, its Gorilla Glass 3 coated 5-inch display gets a HD resolution panel and hardware power is managed by a 1.3GHz quad-core Mediatek CPU with 1GB RAM and 16GB internal storage, the phone’s camera is still pretty decent with 8-megapixel f/2.2 main and 5-megapixel front, the phone will support dual SIMs and sports a huge 3000mAh battery, do note that its bottom part has rounded sides in contrast to the higher end SF1.
Interestingly, Obi will start selling its phones out of its homeland and the Worldphones are expected to go on sale in October this year starting with Vietnam, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Pakistan, Turkey, India and the UAE, the phones will come preloaded with a customized version of Android 5.1 Lollipop as well. The SF1 will retail at $199 (RM830) and $249 (RM1038) for the standard and premium model respectively, while the SJ1.5 will retail at a cheaper $129 (RM538) price tag.
