Vodafone has revealed what it calls the “lowest-cost mobile phone on Earth” during the Mobile World Congress.

Called the Vodafone 150, the handset is aimed at the developing world and is expected to be sold for around $15 – that’s about £10. The mobile phone will be available to begin with in India and Turkey, and eight African countries including Ghana and Kenya.

The Vodafone 150 is a simple handset, as you’d expect considering its price tag. The screen is just 1 inch and the display is in monochrome. The minimal features stretch to SMS, support for mobile payment services, ringtones, two games and an inbuilt torch on the back of the phone. The battery life is good with up to 400 hours on standby and 5 hours battery talk time.

There is an enhanced version of the 150 called the 250 which will sell for $20. The Vodafone 250 comes with a colour screen and FM radio.

The demand for mobile phones in developing countries is growing because people can use their handset to access mobile health services and banking. As the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) secretary general Dr Hamadoun Toure said: “Even the simplest, low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve healthcare in the developing world.”

One example of the good mobile phones can achieve, is that a text message can “deliver instructions on when and how to take complex medication such as anti-retrovirals or vaccines”.

With regards to mobile banking, Vodafone estimates that over 11 million of its customers are using these services currently. The company said the reason for designing the Vodafone 150 was to bring these health and banking services to more people.

To learn more about the Vodafone 150, head to BBC News or watch the introductory video below.

The rumour of a brand new Vodafone-branded mobile phone has been confirmed by Bluetooth.org. The new phone is likely to be called the Vodafone 547 and has entertainment and affordability at its core.

Details on the new handset are still scarce but we do know the Vodafone 547 will be created by ZTE, one of Vodafone’s hardware partners. The design of the mobile is simple. The touchscreen takes up much of the room on the front of the phone with the call/call end touch-sensitive buttons below. The resolution of the screen (size to be confirmed) is expected to be 400×240 pixels.

The handset will support GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks along with multimedia features. There will be Mobile TV inbuilt on the Vodafone 547 with a shortcut to this application from the home screen.

Although the size of the touchscreen is as yet unknown, we do know it will auto-rotate to make typing on-screen easier for those longer messages. And the price of the new Vodafone phone is likely to be small.

This is not the first time Vodafone has branded a mobile phone. There have been a number of Pay As You Go handsets such as the VF231, VF527 and the VF830, as well as the more-recent Vodafone 360 H1 and M1. The H1 and M1 are LiMo-based, touchscreen mobiles. The H1 is all about multimedia and boasts features including a 3.5 inch screen, a 5-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi. The M1 is a more affordable handset with no Wi-Fi and a 3-megapixel camera and 3.2 inch screen. Both were created by Samsung.

We are excited about what the new Vodafone-branded mobile phone, the Vodafone 547, can deliver. After selling 100,000 iPhones during week one, Vodafone must be feeling pretty positive about the mobile market. It is unlikely the new 547 will rival the iPhone –because this is clearly not the audience it is targeting, with its affordable price, and because few can (the Google Nexus One, for example, only sold 20,000 handsets in week one) – but time will tell how welcome an addition to the Vodafone portfolio of own-branded phones the 547 will be.

We’ll let you know more about the Vodafone 547 as soon as details become available.