John Sculley, a man who served as CEO of Apple for a decade starting in 83, is working with the design firm that helped create Beats headphones to produce a new breed of smartphones for use outside of the US. The idea isn't to hit developing markets with more cheap, plastic devices that serve as hollow shells of the high-end counterparts sold elsewhere. Sculley's Obi Worldphone wants to offer young people a slightly more premium device with spiffy packaging.

Yes, the Obi Worldphone SF1 (named after San Francisco, where the Ammunition design firm is located) is a pretty generic looking black rectangle, but it comes with a unibody design supplemented by metallic accents and a raised glass display. More impressive, though, is what's on the spec sheet: a Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 processor with Adreno 405 GPU, a 5-inch 1080x1920 Gorilla Glass 4 display, a 13MP camera, a 3,000mAH battery, and up to 3GB of RAM. All of this comes at a price point ranging from $200 to $250, depending on whether you want 16GB or 32GB of storage and 2GB or 3GB of RAM.

There's also a second, weaker device called the Obi Worldphone SJ1.5. It comes with a slower MediaTek MT6580 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a lower resolution 720x1280 5-inch display. The price, though, comes in at $130. Interestingly, this model apparently ships with Android 5.1, while the SF1 gets 5.0.2. But unlike the SF1, the SJ1.5 is limited to 3G.

Frankly, these sound like options we wouldn't mind seeing in the US, but Obi intends to sell both devices in the likes of India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tanzania, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam starting in October. Both are planned to hit 50 to 70 countries by 2017.

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