Research In Motion (RIM) today launched the much anticipated Blackberry Curve 9360 smartphone in India in association with Airtel.

Under the partnership, Airtel is offering two months of free trial usage period for new users. New users would get Rs 299 BlackBerry plan of Airtel for free for two months while they can enjoy local calls for 20 paisa per second and free SMS service to any one BlackBerry number of choice for one year from the date of purchase. The phone is priced at Rs. 19, 990.

BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphone comes with a 2.44 inch touchscreen but does not feature a touchscreen based display like the older Curve smartphones. To make this device stylish and good looking the company has given it a slim profile whereas the weight of the device has been kept low at 99 grams.

It is powered by BlackBerry 7 OS and runs on an 800 MHz single core processor. This phone comes with 512 MB of RAM, 512 MB ROM, 4 GB Internal Memory and an option to expand memory up to 32 GB via a microSD card.

It has a 5 Megapixel camera with flash but can only record in VGA mode. The BlackBerry Curve 9360, which is a 3G ready device, is capable of five hour’s worth of calls after each recharge. The smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard along with an optical trackpad.

It also has a Near Field Communication chip which allows transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other.

With the BlackBerry 7 OS, Curve 9360 is powered with augmented reality that is enabled with the digital compass and accelerometer. With the Wikitude World Browser, it provides an exciting new way to interact and socialise with the world around.

The new OS also enables the smartphone to have voice-activated universal search, and with speech-to-text translation, one can search for files, email, contacts, music and more &#151 and even search the web &#151 without typing a thing.

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).

Android is the leading smartphone operating system and it has almost double the market share compared to the closest rival is a big surprise, says a recent study report.

According to a US based market research firm, Millennial Media Mobile Mix report, Android LED the smartphone OS market with a 52 per cent share, followed by 28 per cent of iOS. While BlackBerry is the third largest with 13 per cent market share, it has been losing market share to the two of the leaders.

Symbian and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 contributed 1 per cent each. The data is based on USA figures but is representative of the growth of Android and iOS across the world.

Earlier, Gartner in its May report, said that Symbian, the erstwhile market leader, was losing market share especially after Nokia changed track and adopted Windows Phone 7 as its preferred operating system. In 2010, Symbian had 44.2 per cent market share in smartphone segment, which reduced to 27.4 per cent in May this year and now if this Millennial Media is to be believed it has fallen further. However, Nokia was never very strong in USA and so it does not meant that world figures would be that low for Symbian.

In India though, Nokia’s Symbian still continues to be a major operating system, with more than 70 per cent market share in the mobile operating system space. However in smartphone space, the Nokia’s OS is losing the share much more rapidly and now represents only 35 per cent market share. In terms of handset brand, Nokia continues to be the top brand but Samsung is closing in fast with 26 per cent market share already.

Samsung is aiming 40 per cent market share in India, and is riding on the success of its Android based Galaxy series of smartphones.

This Mobile Mix report also tracked the top 20 handsets with the iPhone making up 13.06 per cent. The second place handset was the LG Optimus at 6.71 per cent, probably largely due to it being cheap and in some cases free with a new two-year contract. However, the study did combine the count for current and older generations of the same device series. For instance, the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS were counted together, while the Motorola Droid and Droid 2 were lumped together as well.

The iPhone takes the lead in the top 20 handsets, 15 of those run Android, making up 33 per cent. Rounding out the top 20 are the BlackBerry Curve, Bold, Torch, and Pearl.

Additionally, the study also produced a Device OS Mix chart that now includes tablets and handheld gaming devices, MP3 players, and other connected devices. Tracking the impressions, smartphones now make up 72 per cent of the market, while feature phones and connected device each make up 14 per cent.

While in India, smartphone segment is growing but it is yet to breach the 20 per cent market share mark. Tablets especially the low cost ones from the newer brands have created new interest in the segment with price of tablets now starting from where low end smartphones start and support all the features which these smartphones support.