The iPhone may not have ‘officially’ arrived in India yet, but it surely has left mobile phone makers ‘touchy’. The influence of the device was not hard to miss at the fourth annual Mobile Asia held at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi.
Major handset vendors like Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson had displayed their upcoming devices and quite a few of them happened to be touchscreens.
Samsung showcased about 18 products ranging from Rs 1600 to Rs 1 lakh that are expected to be launched in the first half of 2008. About six to seven of these happened to be touchscreens, also including the much talked about designer phones Giorgio Armani and the Serenata from the Bang & Olufsen series. The former is expected to be launched in about 10 days at approximately Rs 35,000. Sunil Dutt, Country Head, Mobile Business, Samsung Electronics India, said, “Going forward, touchscreen will be common to some of our phones but not the deciding factor”.
After losing out on the Prada, the much-awaited touchscreen beauty that was never launched in the country by the Korean company, it is now planning to launch a range of its other touchscreen handsets. In the line up is a multimedia phone expected to launch later this month at Rs 16,000. The company also has plans to launch its first enterprise device based on Windows Mobile platform by about April at an estimated Rs 20,000.
Sony Ericsson, so far popular for its multimedia devices showcased the first handset of its enterprise brand Xperia that was announced at the Mobile World Congress held at Barcelona in February. No prizes for guessing that the handset is a touchscreen, with a keypad hidden beneath it. Nokia kept its focus largely on showcasing services like navigation and gaming apart from showcasing the handsets that were announced at the Mobile World Congress.
{{/usCountry}}Sony Ericsson, so far popular for its multimedia devices showcased the first handset of its enterprise brand Xperia that was announced at the Mobile World Congress held at Barcelona in February. No prizes for guessing that the handset is a touchscreen, with a keypad hidden beneath it. Nokia kept its focus largely on showcasing services like navigation and gaming apart from showcasing the handsets that were announced at the Mobile World Congress.
{{/usCountry}}About 2,50,000 people visited the event at the time of writing this.