Google invests $22 million in operating system for cheap phones

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Google has invested $22 million in KaiOS, an operating system for cheap phones. That operating system runs on the Nokia 8110 4G from Nokia, the reissue of the ‘banana phone’.

Google has already worked with the company behind KaiOS to make its services such as Assistant, Maps and YouTube available for phones on that platform, and now Google has also transferred money, KaiOS Technologies reports. Assistant, Maps and YouTube work with web technologies such as html, JavaScript and css on the phones, which work on low-power processors, and with relatively little memory and storage.

Nokia already showed that the Google apps worked on KaiOS with the demonstration of the 8110 4G at the end of February at the Mobile World Congress telecom fair in Barcelona. In addition, apps from Facebook and Twitter are also on the phone and the company says it is working on getting WhatsApp on KaiOS as well.

KaiOS sees the integration of Assistant in particular as a big step for KaiOS, because it makes it easier to create texts and enter commands on the phones, which often only have a numeric keypad with t9 function for input. It is unknown what the company will do with the money. In addition to HMD, KaiOS also works with TCL, the company that has licenses for brands such as BlackBerry, Alcatel and Palm.

Looking back: video preview of, among others, the Nokia 8110 4G from the Mobile World Congress

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