In November 2019, Uganda launched her first non-smartphone called the SIMI S300 at an ICT manufacturing and assembling plant. Under the SIMI mobile brand, this is the first phone to be mass assembled in Uganda at their new factory in Namanve. Currently, the factory employs 300 Ugandans.
Today, SIMI mobile has announced plans to make phones with inbuilt solar charging battery and temperature testing. Solar battery charging phones come in handy in areas where people are not connected to the power grid or power is unreliable.
Huawei’s 2020 smartphones also promised to have an IR temperature sensor integrated into the rear camera block that can measure the surface temperature of people and objects just like a normal thermometer. In a year when containing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is a major concern and a fever can be an early indicator of infection. SIMI mobile plans to have a similar solution to its upcoming.
The first of these Huawei smartphones was the Honor Play 4 Pro. Smartphones have always been the modern tech equivalent of a multi-purpose Army knife, combining a phone, a music player, a camera, a GPS, a PDA, and more into a single device and now we see smartphones with thermometers.
Launched by the President of Uganda, the SIMI mobile plant came into existence after the government signed an agreement with Chinese owned SIMI technologies in July last year to promote the manufacturing of ICT electronics in Uganda.
The assembly plant of the SIMI S300 phone was estimated to run three production lines at full capacity; each line with daily production of 2,000 feature phones, 1,500 smartphones, 800 laptops, 2,000 chargers, 4,000 USB cables, and 4000 sets of earphones and directly employing more than 400 staff. The manufacturing of these 2G feature phones however went against the government’s recent push for 3G and 4G wireless mobile technologies country-wide and increasing internet penetration.
