Safaricom Neon Kicka 5 now available for KES. 3,499

Safaricom’s best seller smartphone, the Neon Kicka 4, has been discontinued. This ultra-affordable phone that targeted everyone who didn’t have a smartphone – in Safaricom’s Maisha Ni Digital Campaign – sold quite well all over the country. It got more Kenyans onto the 3G network, and on to the smartphone life. Safaricom has now introduced the Neon Kicka 5, a replacement that carries on with the exact same purpose – getting more Kenyans into the smartphone life.

The Neon Kicka 5 features a new design, a bigger display, a slightly bigger battery, and doubles up internal storage. However, we find the same specs as with the Neon Kicka 4 in terms of the processor, and the cameras.

Last year, Safaricom sold close to 1 million Neon Smartphones – and the Neon Kicka 4 was among these. The Series currently has a couple of other Neon devices offering different specs at low prices. Customers have different options when buying them including paying with Bonga Points.

Sometime back this year, Safaricom announced they will be selling 4G smartphones for up to KES. 20 a day under their Lipa Mdogo Mdogo financing plan. This is yet to go live. But the fact that the Neon Kicka 5 is a 3G-only smartphone, it means this device probably won’t be part of that plan. It may be that Safaricom has other Neon devices on the way to replace the Neon Ray, Neon Nova, and Neon Storm devices. Or it may be that Safaricom plans to have devices from other manufacturers in this Lipa Mdogo Mdogo scheme, let’s wait and see.

The Neon Kicka 5 now has a 4.95-inch display, up from 4 inches on the Kicka 4. There’s now 8GB of storage, up from 4GB. And a removable 1800mAh battery, up from 1500mAh. The device now runs Android 9 Pie Go edition, up from Android 8.1 Oreo. The rest of the features including the processor, the RAM, and the cameras remain the same. However, the biggest change is visual with its new design. The full specifications are listed below:

Neon Kicka 5 Specifications: