Safaricom, Intel’s African partner, is currently very happy after the company flogged initial inventory of five thousand Intel Yolo phones in less than two weeks. The device, a product of Intel and Safaricom’s joint research, was launched in the country about one month ago. According to Peter Arina, Safaricom’s director of the consumer business unit, the company had stocked 5,000 initial units.

The mobile phone uses Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.1. Intel promised that the latter would be upgraded to 4.2 soon. In the meanwhile, physical specs include 4GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rear camera, a 3.5 inch display and even high speed 3G.

In his conversation with CIO East Africa, Safaricom’s director of corporate affairs, Nzioka Waita, explained that the depletion of initial stock had caused a price hike. Nzioka also claimed they were so confident that the device would become a bestseller that they weren’t planning to be subsidizing feature phones any longer.

In the meanwhile, Communications of Kenya Statistics as of September 2012 reveal that Kenya had 8,500,000 Internet subscriptions, 8,400,000 of them being mobile Internet subscriptions. According to the same statistics, Safaricom had 5,600,000 web subscribers.

Although all this is small, provided that the press had more or less written off tech giant in the mobile market, it’s great news for Chipzilla.