How To Buy Freedom 251 Mobile

Freedom 251 Bookings on Freedom251.com - How to Buy One on Friday

Noida-based firm Ringing Bells officially launched the Freedom 251 smartphone in New Delhi on Wednesday. At the launch, the company said you can buy the Rs. 251 smartphone by heading to the official website freedom251.com and book your unit for delivery.

On Friday, Ringing Bells issued a statement saying there has been unprecedented demand for the Freedom 251 and it has temporarily suspended bookings. Earlier on Thursday, many users reported problems while trying to buy the smartphone. When we tried to buy a Freedom 251 unit, we were thrown back to the screen that asks for shipping details, and based on reports on social media we are not alone.

Things to remember before you buy the Freedom 251

1. A general rule in life - if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
2. Ringing Bells is an unknown brand with no track record in electronics, so it's difficult to ascertain at this point what the quality of the final product and the after-sales will be like.
3. We noted other concerns with our Freedom 251 review unit, though the company later told us it does not represent the final unit that will ship to customers.
4. The company says it may take up to 4 months for your unit to ship - so keep that in mind before you book a Freedom 251. Given the company's lack of any kind of a track record, there's an outside chance that it may never ship at all.
5. There seems to be no kind of return policy on the website, though it does say your Freedom 251 unit is covered by a one-year warranty.

Ringing Bells says bookings for the Freedom 251 will reopen on Friday. Now that you hopefully know what you are getting into, here are the steps to book your Freedom 251 unit:

1. Head to the official website freedom251.com.
2. Click on Buy Now button.
3. Note that the Ringing Bells is charging Rs. 40 for shipping Freedom 251 to your home so the total you will need to pay is Rs. 291.
4. Enter your shipping address, accept the terms and conditions and click on Pay Now to proceed to the payment page.

Note that the Freedom 251 cannot be shipped to an address outside India.

To refresh, the Freedom 251 is a Rs. 251 smartphone that comes with a 4-inch display, a 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage (expandable by up to 32GB), and runs Android 5.1.

Why the Rs 251 Freedom 251 smartphone defeats the purpose of 'Make in India'

The Rs 251 smartphone Freedom 251 is a bad advertisement for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious Make in India programme. Make in India is a very high profile initiative which wants to make India a world class manufacturing hub of everything – starting from mobile phones to aircraft.

The Make in India website says, "The Make in India program was launched by Prime Minister Modi in September 2014 as part of a wider set of nation-building initiatives. Devised to transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub, Make in India was a timely response to a critical situation: by 2013, the much-hyped emerging markets bubble had burst, and India’s growth rate had fallen to its lowest level in a decade. The promise of the BRICS nations had faded, and India was tagged as one of the so-called ‘Fragile Five’. Global investors debated whether the world’s largest democracy was a risk or an opportunity. India’s 1.2 billion citizens questioned whether India was too big to succeed or too big to fail. India was on the brink of severe economic failure."

India should follow the model of Western nations and Japan. Certainly not that of our immediate neighbour China.

Very ambitious plan indeed. India often claims that it does not want to be another China, which is known as low cost factory of the world. India does not want to produce cheap, low cost and low quality products under Make in India. It wants to be like Germany, France, United Kingdom, Japan and USA, the manufacturers of world class iconic products.

The Rs 251 phone which has taken the technology world by storm is not going to help the cause. While there are both fans and sceptics of the Freedom 251, the lingering question is how Ringing Bells will manage to sell a feature rich smartphone at such a low price.

Undeniably what makes a nation a true economic powerhouse in the long run is the quality of its manufacturing and service sectors. By producing cheap, low quality things in large scale no country can become a world class manufacturer overnight. These hotchpotch inventions can make some news, get some eyeballs and also generate some income and jobs for a while. In the long run, they ruin the image of a nation and its capability to produce the best in the world.

Cheap products may have put China on top of world economy in the last two decades. But, Chinese manufacturing sector does not have the credibility and consumer confidence, the products of Western nations or Japan have. Chinese economy is slowing down because of its cheap products.

India should follow the model of Western nations and Japan. Certainly not that of our immediate neighbour China. The populist launches like the Rs 251 mobile phone defeat the very purpose of a big initiative like Make in India.