Our next president, Barack Obama, got elected in part because he transcends the way many Americans thought of race. Raised by his white mother and grandparents in Hawaii and Indonesia, he was also strongly affected by his father, a Kenyan immigrant, and he married into a Black American family. Black, white, Kansan, Kenyan, Hawaiian, he defines his own categories.
So it’s fitting that the “color” of the Obama Phone being sold in Kenya is “Black + Obama colour.” Apparently, Obama is now a color! I’m reminded of a great column I saw online a few months ago – I’m still trying to find the link – where a guy ordered a coffee “Obama,” and got it with just the perfect amount of milk and sweetener.
Anyway, back to the tech. The MI-205f Obama is a basic candybar-style phone with a color screen, flashlight and FM radio, being sold by Mi-Fone, a firm owned by Latin American mega-cell-phone-company America Movil who work with distributors in five African countries. They sell super-low-cost phones to hip African youth, driving mobile phones into new markets.
Mi-Fone jumped on the Obama idea just recently, founder Alpesh Patel said in an e-mail. Obama is tremendously popular in Africa as an inspirational figure, he said, and “is the best thing that has happened to Africa in many, many years.” The phone will serve as a memento of the inauguration for Kenyans, he said.
“Obama is from Africa and we are an African company … We decided to use what we do best, mobile devices, and coordinate the Obama look into one of our products. Furthermore our tagline is, ‘The World Is Yours,’ very inspirational, motivational and aspirational, similar traits to Obama’s tagline ‘Yes, We Can,'” he wrote.
The Obama Phone went on sale Jan. 15 and sold more than 1,000 units in its first day, Patel said. It costs around $30.
The Mi-205f “is a very affordable model and we wanted to ensure that most people can afford the phone,” Patel wrote in an e-mail.
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