Why is the government allocating money to create a "Russian iPhone"? It has already been invented and built. I’m one of the lucky (and very few) owners of this device:
Now I have to carry it with me at all times. It is issued together with an ankle bracelet and tracks the movements of a particularly dangerous criminal. The FSIN (Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service) gets a geotrack of your movements. If the distance between the "Russian iPhone" and the "bracelet" is more than 20 meters (about 66 feet), that means the criminal has escaped.
The SOS button doesn’t work, of course. I must have pressed it a hundred times. It’s supposedly meant to call the FSIN, but I never managed to get through.
I’ll ask the guys at RosPil (Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption project focused on public procurement) to find out exactly what prices the state is paying to procure this miracle of technology, but the FSIN officers themselves treat them like precious cargo, saying they’re very expensive and making you sign a paper stating that you are responsible for any loss of or damage to the "equipment."
Inside there’s an ordinary SIM card, and it has to be charged every night. In terms of functionality, that puts it far behind any phone sold by the metro for 1,000 rubles (roughly US$10–15).
A wonderful thing—and even in a philosophical sense, an excellent symbol of Putin’s Russia: a very expensive, prehistoric-looking phone that tracks its owner’s location. It has four buttons. The "help" button doesn’t work, and the only call you can make is to the "relevant authorities."