Chinese handset maker Huawei is planning to launch low cost Android phones priced between Rs 4,000 and Rs 6,000.
While talking to The Mobile Indian, Anand Narang, marketing and solutions director at Huawei, said, “Apart from the high end phones and tablets like Vision and Mediapad, we will also be launching low cost Android devices along with few other feature phones for the Indian market. These Android phones will not have 3G connectivity but will have all the other features of a typical Android phone including capacitive touch screen.”
He added: “3G is in initial growth stage and we still see growth in EDGE, So we decided to introduce some low cost phones without 3G (with EDGE only) to tap this growth segment and in turn reduce the price of the handsets.”
These low cost Android phones, to be launched in the next three months, will have all the other features including radio, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, and will make sense for many users who find 3G services and smartphones too costly.
One of the potential phones could be the Huawei u8110, which has a 2.8 inch screen and is currently based on Android 2.1, and we expect the Indian version to have Android 2.2.
The price point that Huawei is looking at is currently served by high end feature phones with QWERTY or touch keypads, and with 3G in a few and WiFi in most.
It will be interesting to see what Huawei comes up with. The product has to be good quality as there are a lot of good feature phones currently in the market from well established players like Nokia and Samsung.
Currently, the cheapest Android device is Spice Mi270, which doesn’t have 3G either, but has all the other features. However, it has not been able to sell in numbers that would please Spice (now S Mobility).