Smartphones under Rs 7,000 soon

The smartphone market will continue to boom this year as handset vendors roll out new, cheaper models and cut prices of the older phones — making them more attractive to a mass-market audience.

The smartphone market will continue to boom this year as handset vendors roll out new, cheaper models and cut prices of the older phones — making them more attractive to a mass-market audience.

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The first Symbian smartphones with unsubsidised prices of 100 euros ($137/ Rs 6,300) will reach the market this year, the chief of the world’s most widely used smartphone platform said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

“This year, we will see a few products hitting that point,” Lee Williams, head of the Symbian Foundation said. However, software security firms warned at the Congress that the smartphones could face an explosion of virus attacks.

“Tomorrow, we could see a worm on phones which would go around the world in five minutes,” said Mikko Hyppoenen, chief research officer at F-Secure, which makes anti-virus software for mobile phones.

Smartphones and mobile internet also got a thumbs up from Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Google also announced two new features: one that translates images of foreign text captured by a camera, such as restaurant menus, and the addition of German as the fourth language supported by Google's voice-recognition technology.