Former Apple CEO John Sculley has launched a new lineup of budget smartphones in the Middle East — although he admits Steve Jobs would like not be enamoured with them.
“Steve being Steve would say, you can do alot better,” he told Gulf Business.
The range includes various animal-themed devices, including the Octopus S520, the Falcon S451, Hornbill S551, Wolverine S501, and Obi F240. They are being launched by India’s Obi Mobile, a budget smartphone brand, which John Sculley co-founded.
But while Sculley says that Jobs would have stuck to the iPhone, the business is Apple-inspired in that it aims to be everything that Apple is not.
“We said how can we take Apple’s brilliance at the premier end of the market and translate it to a market that Apple has no interest to participate in?” Sculley noted. “Which is a very different price point, but yet there are a lot of young people who just don’t have the budget to be able to buy a smartphone at a higher price.”
The top-end Octopus S520 boasts an impressively-sized 5-inch display, 1.7GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, along with dual sim functionality and a 8MP rear camera.
The entry-level Obi Falcon S541, on the other hand, features a 5-inch display, 1.3GHz dual core processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB of storage and 8MP rotating camera.
The devices will be rolled out in the UAE first, followed by most of the lower Gulf, with other markets following over the next year.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launched in the UAE last Friday, along with 21 other secondary markets.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
3 responses to “Ex Apple CEO launches five new smartphones in the Middle East”
Pictures?
A lot*
Ha! Suspenders with jeans! Even as Jobs was trying to pass himself off as a corporate insider he still couldn’t escape his hippy heritage.
And poor John Sculley, still haunted by Jobs after all of these years.