{"id":29066,"date":"2012-12-30T14:00:55","date_gmt":"2012-12-30T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=29066"},"modified":"2012-12-30T14:37:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T12:37:20","slug":"first-african-designed-smartphone-launches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/29066\/first-african-designed-smartphone-launches\/","title":{"rendered":"First African-designed smartphone launches"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Congolese inventor has unveiled what he says is the first African-designed smartphone.<\/p>\n

Verone Mankou, 27, told AFP that the so-called Elikia, which means “hope” in the local language, went on sale the day before in the Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n

Mankou, head of the company VMK, said the Android-powered device was on sale in only in Congo for now, but he planned to launch it in other countries.<\/p>\n

The phone was initially due to go on sale in October but its launch was delayed “because of an explosion in demand,” he said.<\/p>\n

Though the phone is Congolese by design, it is manufactured in China. It costs about 130 euros ($170) — a considerable sum in this central African nation.<\/p>\n

The phone has a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 512 megabytes of RAM and a 650-Mhz processor. Its camera is five megapixels, and it also comes with GPS and Bluetooth.<\/p>\n

Mankou last year designed what was billed as Africa’s first tablet computer.<\/p>\n

\"Elikia\"<\/a>

Elikia<\/p><\/div>\n

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A Congolese inventor has unveiled what he says is the first African-designed smartphone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":29068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4926,26,227,117,4925],"class_list":["post-29066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-elikia","tag-headline","tag-smartphone","tag-smartphones","tag-verone-mankou"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29066"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29072,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29066\/revisions\/29072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}