Walmart is selling a $10 Android smartphone with better specs than the first iPhone

The year was 2007. On the radio, Mims was struggling to articulate exactly why he was hot and Fergie was rubbing her “Glamorous” lifestyle in our collective faces. George W. Bush was president, and Steve Jobs showcased the smartphone that would revolutionize the market: the original iPhone.

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It’s eight years later, and now Walmart is selling a device that trumps that smartphone handedly. Only instead of costing you $599, this LG Android device is going for $9.82.

Granted, it’s running a paleolithic version of Android that isn’t exactly ideal from a security standpoint, and you’re probably not going to make much progress on Octodad with it. Nevertheless, the idea that you can get this level of technology for a single Alexander Hamilton is pretty mind-blowing.

The LG TracFone has a 3.8-inch display and a 3MP camera. It can’t swing 4G, but 3G networks are within its reach. With its wifi capabilities, you could easily stream some pretty decent video on the device, and streaming music from a service like Google Play Music All Access or Spotify would be well within its reach.

Consider this: Walmart sells a 4GB USB flash drive for about the same price. This smartphone has the same amount of internal storage, except you can also order pizza on it and tweet Obama your opinions on geopolitical issues.

This colossal price drop serves as a reminder of how fast this competitive industry is developing. Imagine the phone in your pocket clasped in clamshell packaging and strung on a rack at a megastore for a handful of dollars. That’s a reality less than a decade away, and the technology that will have rendered it nearly obsolete will be at most people’s fingertips. The future will be fascinating.

LG G5 may have a metal unibody design

Assuming Samsung had not sprung for the metal and glass Galaxy S6 design language, it’s likely that critics of LG’s G4 would have found much less to complain about. In the end, what the company did produce was a refinement of its G3 from last year, and – in part – attention was paid to the fact that this year’s offering still supplied a user replaceable battery and included microSD support. Two things Samsung removed. Still, the build quality was often cited as being a cause for the consideration that the G4 was “not premium”. Things may be in for a major change next year, at least based on a new rumor.

A report on Naver posted earlier today suggests that LG will in fact, be using a metal unibody for 2016’s G5. While this isn’t much to go on, it would logically make sense given that the company has already sought to include metal in its recently released V10 handset. While it would remain to be seen as to what kind of metal the G5 would have – the V10 is amazingly resilient to drops – at the very least it would serve to offer a more direct rivalry with whatever premium product Samsung plans to launch next year, be it early or business as usual.

LG has been suffering from sluggish sales, both with its G4 and – at least according to reports in Korea – the new V10. This kind of drastic design difference could be just what the doctor ordered.

We would like to take this opportunity to remind our readers that until LG itself makes any information public, this kind of news is therefore unconfirmed and speculative.

What do you think? Would a unibody design make all the difference for your consideration of the G5? While it would seemingly negate the user-replaceable battery bit, microSD could still be supported. Let us know in the comments section below!

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