Even though the Malagasy can buy basic phones for as little as $5, this is still too much for many people in such a poor country.
However, U.S. carriers like Verizon -- which owns AOL, the parent company of The Huffington Post -- continue to offer a slew of "basic phones" for your low-tech needs.
Firefly Mobile, an eight-year-old company, has been marketing basic phones for children for several years.
And older children should be given basic phones for talking and texting, not smartphones that can be loaded with applications.
Unlike Windows Mobile, with it's loosey goosey promise of Windows compatibility or the endless feature lists of some of the more basic phones, the G1 offers a platform for multiple amazing things, all arrayed to the user in a non-trivial way.
Nokia, the cellphone maker based in Espoo, Finland, disclosed gains in its core basic phones business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, after it introduced handsets in India and Asia that operated with two SIM cards, a preference in developing markets.
More awkward is the lack of support for one-handed use, except for basic phone functions: When the flip is open, you're forced to grab the pen out of the battery on the back or smudge the screen with your finger just to do simple scrolling.
Samsung, the world's biggest handset maker in terms of volumes both of basic phones and smartphones, was the key fish for InterDigital to land in that collective dispute.
But so far consumers have tended to shun the more expensive models in favor of more basic phones that sell for less.
Verizon offers 75-megabyte plans for basic phones, as well as two-, five- and 10-gigabyte plans for smartphones, topping out at $80 a month.
