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.

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.