One of the most important tech stories in the coming years will be the bridging of the "digital divide." Only one-third of the world is online, which leaves about 4.8 billion people unplugged with no way to access the Web. A lot of work needs to be done on the ISP side, but people in these poorer countries will need devices, too.

Here at Ars, we're trying to go on a bit of an international tour. We've already checked out the surprisingly good Xiaomi Mi4 from China, but, at $350, that's way too expensive for most of The Disconnected. We've got our eye on the Android One event happening in India in a few days, but at a rumored price of $115 to $165, those are still pretty expensive.

In India, the average salary was $1,570 in 2013 (compared to $51,755 in the USA), which makes ~$150 a pretty big purchase. So we need to go cheaper. That leads us to what is probably the world's cheapest smartphone, India's Intex Cloud Fx, which costs a whopping $35 (Rs 1,999)—that's cheap.

For $35, you get a spec list from six or seven years ago: a 3.5-inch 480×320 LCD, 1GHz Spreadtrum SC6821 SoC, 128MB of RAM, 46MB of internal storage, a 2MP rear camera, and a 1250mAh battery. There's no 3G, GPS, front-facing camera, or camera flash, but at least you get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and EDGE data. There's also a MicroSD slot (mandatory for taking pictures), dual SIM slots, and, oh yeah, it runs Firefox OS.

Our plan is to try to do a full review, but how do you even evaluate something like this? At only $35, everything about it is going to suck by our smartphone standards. The screen is so bad I'm often not sure what colors it is trying to display, the case feels like it's made out of melted-down Happy Meal toys, the bezel is massive, and the camera is a potato—but it's thirty-five dollars. How can you be that critical of it?

This is the absolute minimum hardware an operating system can run on. Any lower than this and you would have a dollar-store calculator. So what is there to say? The nicest thing you can say about the screen is that it displays information in a way that is comprehensible. The processor will (eventually) accurately process things. The case has served as a good insulator between my hand and the electrical components—I've yet to be electrocuted—and it has also been a competent container for the phone parts—the Cloud Fx hasn't disintegrated in my hand.

We're not setting out to bash it, but for $35, "good" is not really one of the possibilities here. The best we can hope for is "yes it can do that." Any Internet is preferable to no Internet, so that's where we'll start. We can at least tell you what is the most and least frustrating thing about it and try to quantify the speed of a $35 smartphone (Nexus One speed? G1 speed? Do we have any Newton benchmarks?).

Jokes and spoiled developed-world standards aside, what can this thing actually do? We immediately tried to check out Ars, but even the simple act of opening a Web page is an exercise in frustration. The Cloud Fx can't keep up with normal-speed typing. You have to press a letter and wait. It's sort of like those horrible touchscreen CRT kiosks you occasionally still see in places. We had to resort to the strategy of pressing a single letter, verifying that the letter-press was registered, and then we could continue.

Loading the Ars mobile site to completion took 46 seconds over our speedy Wi-Fi connection—we timed it. Our next task was to scroll to the bottom of the page and try the desktop site; after the first few articles chugged by, the screen turned gray and needed to load again. The trick to using the Cloud Fx is that you have to let it "catch up" to what you are doing sometimes. If you enter too many commands at once, it will freeze up for long periods at a time.

Once we agonizingly scrolled to the bottom of the Ars homepage, we hit the "View full site" link and crossed our fingers. After a minute, we remembered why mobile sites exist. Five minutes in, and we started to worry if it would ever finish, and after 10 minutes with there STILL being a loading bar on the screen, our battery (which was low when we started) died. We're not sure if the browser just got stuck, or if this is typical. We'll have to charge up and try again later.

It's not as incredibly bad as it sounds. A readable page with pictures popped up after about a minute, which you could use to skim headlines. The remaining nine involved loading additional parts of the site, and occasionally things flickered and seemingly loaded again. Attempting to scroll while this is happening is not recommended. The worst possible thing you can ask of the Cloud Fx is for it to do more than one thing at once, and we did get frustrated and try to scroll during our 10-minute marathon loading session. For the most part, the phone is completely unresponsive while loading a Web page.

Yes, the Cloud Fx is well below the standard of any developed world smartphone, but this device isn't for the developed world. This is for people who would normally never be able to afford an Internet device, and for them, even the slowest Internet is better than no Internet at all. It's easy to forget how great everything over here is, and we'll try to keep that in mind when we're diving in to the world's cheapest smartphone.

Besides the device itself, we're also going to check in on FireFox OS. To give the OS a little more of a fighting chance, we splurged and picked up the "high-end" $80 ZTE Open C, which is a much nicer device than the as-cheap-as-possible Cloud Fx. We'll have to dive in to the apps, app store, and just what you can do with a browser-based OS.

Firefox OS adds a bit of difficulty to the review. There really aren't any hardware benchmarks for Firefox OS, and the few browser benchmarks that do exist don't work. Google Octane and even Mozilla's Kraken benchmark just outright crashes the browser. The same goes for our browser-based battery test—it instantly crashes. We did get a run of sunspider to finish, so we can at least have a chart for that, and maybe we'll bust out a stop watch and do a few runs of website loads.

So buckle up people, because we've got a whole review ahead of us that is like this. Be on the lookout for it at some point in the future. First, though, we're going to throw the floor open to you readers. What should we do with our Firefox phones? Is there anything in particular you'd like to see us try?