If you have a standard brick-and-mortar kind of store, this is less of an issue, because you can set up your point of sale terminal on a relatively permanent basis. What about mobile salespeople, though? What about taxi drivers? Accepting various forms of payment when you don’t have one set location can be quite the challenge, but the newly announced BiasharaPhone is a cell phone that can also double as a point of sale machine.

On the one side is what appears to be a standard Siemens candybar cell phone. Using the cellular connection, you can accept various credit and debit cards around the back. It is also on the backside that you’ll find a numeric keypad for entering PINs and the like. In this way, the BiasharaPhone is a hybrid, handling both voice calls and customer payments.

The BiasharaPhone has officially been launched in Kenya, a country where walking around with a wad of cash isn’t the brightest idea. It’s much better to have a portable credit card machine like this if you’re going to be a mobile merchant.