WIRED:Access to the web could drive further social change across the world

THE HUAWEI Ideos is not the fastest phone on the market. It doesn’t brim with features. It doesn’t even have the best battery life and it’s certainly not the cheapest phone. But it is the cheapest smart phone at around €75. Or more to the point, 8499 Kenyan shillings.

There’s been much talk of the sub-$100 (or €75) smart phone, especially at the Mobile World Congress, the meeting of the world’s mobile phone manufacturers, phone companies and analysts, which took place last week in Barcelona. The truth is that in name at least, Android phones have been hitting close to €75 for a while: you can pick up one for that on a pay as you go plan across most of Europe.

But the Huawei Ideos is the real, unsubsidised deal. And despite being significantly pricier than the cheapest phone, which hovers around the €10 mark, the phone has been selling very well in Kenya, a market that by all accounts is the leading indicator for the billions of basic mobile users outside the US and Europe.

This is the beginning of a major shift in what we can expect from mobile phones and their users across the world. It will take some time to play out, but smart phones will remorselessly push out other phones.

The smart phone market hit 100 million shipped units this year. That’s triple the total three years ago and double that a year earlier. As Finnish analysts Asymco note, a growth rate of that nature, in the midst of a recession, can only demonstrate where the market is heading. Commentators at the congress were already talking about €60 Android devices, which takes smart phones below the average price for all phones last year.

It’s easy to see this as a battle between Android and Apple, Microsoft and RIM. But what it also means is that the five billion mobile phone users across the world will also have access to the internet. All the major vendors of next-generation smart phones include web and net access by default and their browsers and applications can handle the demands of sending, receiving and displaying net content as easily and as speedily as the PCs that defined the first wave of popular internet use.

Kenyan internet data plans are about €10 for 600MB, which is well over the average used by smart phones – far more than the average subscriber costs for the modern African, but close to the price paid just a few years go. It makes sense for phone companies, faced with this falling revenue, to guide its emerging market customers back to a more expensive model.

In return though, every new smart phone user gains an incredible amount of information and the chance to contribute to a two-way conversation.

Concentrating on Kenya once more, the country’s innovative M-Pesa system, which allows phone users to store, bank and trade money using their mobile phones, was for the first time connected to the Visa credit/debit card system. So now millions of Kenyans will also be able to buy goods online.

We’ve seen incredible changes in North Africa in the past few weeks, which were at least partially encouraged by the access the population there had to the internet and satellite television. But that came at the culmination of a decade-long conversation in relatively affluent countries between radicals, politicians and academics concerning Arab identity that had at least the partial attention of the West.

If the average westerner has a hazy idea of the Middle East, their understanding of sub-Saharan Africa and other poorer places in the world is almost non-existent, mediated by aid organisations and those countries’ often autocratic leaders. Direct communication between the citizens of African countries is often not much better.

With bidirectional access to the internet on mobile phones, there are at least opportunities for that to change. It’s unlikely that smart phones or the net on their own will be a driver for that transformation. It will take profit-seeking companies or change-seeking activists and politicians to take advantage of the new opportunity.

But that change is going to come incredibly quickly. Four years ago, the iPhone had just launched and was being primarily sold to users who were already blasé about the promise and potential of the internet. In four years’ time, equivalent tools will be in the hands of hundreds of millions who will never have experienced the net before.

They will not have had the opportunity to download and examine free resources that would have dwarfed even national libraries. They will never have been able to correct what is being said about them. They will never before had the opportunity to publish to their fellow citizens without first asking permission, whether it was from a publishing house, a printer or a government.

It doesn’t really matter who wins the smart phone war. What matters is what those who will own them will do with their new individual, power.