Gmail is bringing out a free service [3] in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya that’ll funnel email via SMS to feature phones without 3G or Wi-Fi connections. Once you toggle the feature and enter in your phone number, the service automatically forwards on emails to your cell phone, even letting you compose a reply and send it via text, that your recipient will receive in their inbox. While a shift to cheap smartphones [4] is beginning in areas in Africa, basic cell phones are still hugely popular. Keeping that in mind, in a similar move, Facebook partnered up with Orange [5] to allow feature phones on the cellular network to plug into Facebook.

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