The cheapest phone in the world is a $9 watch

Think about a phone or a mobile handset and the first thing that often comes to mind is a slab of glass, not a watch.

Well, turns out that a smartwatch may now be the cheapest way to make a phone call - and we’re not talking about bluetoothing your way to a proper handset.

No, there’s a whole raft of smartwatches that take a SIM card and allow you to make calls. Take the LEEHUR V8 (loosely based on L’heure, meaning the time in French) which retails for $8.99 at Gearbest and comes in black, white, red and blue.

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Timely

It packs a proper chipset, the Mediatek MTK6261D, with 64MB RAM and 128MB storage. You can add a microSD card of up to 32GB capacity. The screen itself is a 1.22-inch touchscreen model with a 240 x 240 pixel resolution.

The LEEHUR V8 comes with Bluetooth 3.0, a front facing camera camera with a claimed resolution of 1.3-megapixel, a 380mAh battery and a stainless steel chassis. It has a slew of features but bear in mind that this is a watch that costs $8.99 so there’s plenty of things that can go awry.

The biggest one is that the phone operates on GPRS/2G spectrum so no blazing 3G speeds here. Battery life is likely to be poor and it is not waterproof. Some of the features won’t work on an iPhone as there’s no app for it in the App Store. We’ve called one in for a quick look.