Former Apple CEO Relaunches Obi as Obi Worldphone

John Sculley, Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993, took the industry by surprise today when he unveiled a relaunch of Obi, now called Obi Worldphone.

With help from Robert Brunner, Ammunition design founder, Obi Worldphone looks pretty darn cool and unique. It’s an inexpensive phone with mid-level performance capabilities.

The new Android smartphone has been launched in two different models.

The Obi Worldphone SF1 which costs $199.
The Obi Worldphone SJ1.5 which costs $129.

Both models will be available this October. The company’s target demo is 25 year olds and younger. John Sculley is aiming the new redesigned Obi at emerging markets in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

With Xiaomi and Huawei reigning kings in China, surpassing Apple and taking the first and second place in the country, it is unknown at the moment if John will try to tackle this market too.

Both Obi Worldphone models will feature your usual components like Qualcomm and MediaTek procs, with the latter being used for the $129 Obi. Corning Gorilla Glass, a Sony camera and Dolby sound for both smartphones.

The thing is, Sculley and his company will focus more on how the Obi Worldphone looks rather than what it’s equipped with. They want to be a design-led company, he told Engadget.

Sculley thinks that they have the upper-hand when it comes to competing with mobile industry giants like Apple, HTC and Samsung. The smartphone manufacturer notes that because these companies are so huge they don’t have that much liberty to play with design or branding material. They tend to move slower.

This, paired with the Obi Worldphone being a fresh start-up, makes John’s company more free to swap components and change smartphone designs to better server users.

The $199 model is a 4G and LTE equipped smartphone. It has a reinforced fiberglass body due to Corning Gorilla Glass, and it’s 5-inch display is sharp and crystal clear. It has two Sony camera units with flashes on the back and the front. The SF1 features a Snapdragon 615 proc with 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of storage space. For $249 you’ll get 3 gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of storage space.

The cheaper SJ1.5 model has 3G support, a MediaTek quad-core proc and 16GB of storage.

Both models run on Android 5.1 Lollipop and both phones have dual SIM slots. The latter is a must-have for emerging countries.

Initially, it will see the light of day in Pakistan, Turkey, India, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Keynia, Thailand, Saudia Arabia, the UAE, Indonesia and Vietnam.

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Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.