A few months ago, I excitedly wrote a blog post here about the announcement from LG’s Kenya office that the Optimus Android smartphone (also known as the GT540) would be launched in Kenya sometime in June 2010. As events would have it, this never happened in June 2010 and instead its taken a few more months to finally make it here.
At the time, no Android smartphones had been launched in Kenya so it was something of a landmark moment when the announcement was made. However, since then, both Huawei and Sony Ericsson have launched a total of five Android handsets that are now retailing exclusively in Kenya via Safaricom’s Shops.
Therefore, it came as something of a shock this week when I was reading one of the newspapers and saw an ad for LG that showed that they had indeed launched the Optimus in Kenya (possibly as early as this week?) This took me by surprise as I had expected that LG would have made a big deal when they finally launched an Android handset and probably would have done so in conjunction with a mobile network such as Huawei and Sony Ericsson had done? No such thing (yet) apparently.
The LG Optimus was only introduced into the global marketplace sometime around May 2010 so its actually a pretty new Android smartphone by any standard. The irony however is that the LG ad in the newspaper was a general one with other handsets featured alongside the Optimus with some basic specifications for each one – quite disappointing if you ask me for what should a major event for them in Kenya.
However, what caught my eye is that the Optimus has a retail price of Kes. 25,499.00 which in my opinion is a fair price for what is a top of the line Android smartphone. What remains to be seen is how well the Optimus performs in the marketplace considering that there has been hardly any kind of marketing for it – this will certainly hurt sales unless LG Kenya is planning to do something big soon. Whatever the case, its really great that more and more Android smartphones are finding their way to Kenya and things can only get better from here. You can find out more about the Optimus smartphone here>
I’ve been waiting for this to happen for some time! Finally, an Google Android handset is expected to be launched in Kenya in June 2010. This is the