We haven’t heard very much about John Sculley ever since he was forced to step down as the CEO of Apple more than a two decades ago, but he’s been far from inactive. Scully has spent the last 22 years as a successful and widely-respected investor that has advised and backed numerous successful companies, and now he’s teaming up with a major design firm out of San Francisco to bring us gorgeous smartphones at a reasonable price. Mid-range smartphones tend to do away with the nice designs that their higher-end counterparts focus so much on, but Scully wants to change this with a new line of affordable yet stylish Android smartphones.
John Sculley — now there’s a name you may not have heard in a while. The former Apple CEO is back, and is teaming with a top San Francisco design firm on a $199 Android smartphone designed to bring high-end features and looks to the low-end smartphones increasingly popular in much of the world. Sure, that’s a claim also being made by plenty of others, from global players like Motorola to startups. But Sculley, a former Pepsi chief, says he isn’t worried about diving into what has become a highly competitive, very price-sensitive market. “I love commodity industries,” he said. “You can’t get more commodity than sugar water.” Sculley’s Obi Worldphone SF1 (an homage to San Francisco) appears to deliver much for its low-end price. The SF1 packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, along with a Sony camera, Dolby sound and a design that aims to stand out from the sea of black metal rectangles. On the looks front, Sculley is working with Robert Brunner’s Ammunition Group, the design shop that helped create Beats by Dre’s signature headphones.
