Android phones in India : Price range, Input and Android version

This is first of a three series posts analyzing the trends of Android phones launched in India.

Google is pushing Android heavily in India. Indian manufacturers like Spice and Micromax are part of Google’s grandiose Android plan. India which is typically neglected and left out of any global gadget launches is seeing its fair share of Android devices. As many as 33 Android phones launched in India in the past twelve months. Some very important trends have emerged by analyzing the specifications of these 33 Android phones.

All the Android phones are 3G enabled phones with touch screens. There are no Dual-SIM phones. Six Phones have a Full QWERTY keyboard along with touch screen, four of which are from Motorola. All the 33 phones are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled. Read the rest of the analysis below.

Manufacturers

HTC, Motorola and Samsung are racing away with 6 phone models each. Sony Ericsson, LG and Dell are closely following in. Acer, Assu-Garmin, Videocon and Spice have just entered the Android race.

Price range

The busiest segment is the Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 15,000. Of the 33 phones launched, as many has 16 phones or close to 50% of phones are in this ranges. Next busiest segmetn is the Rs. 15K – Rs. 20K segment. Dell Streak is the only expensive Android available in India. Interestingly 5K-10K segment has two phones – Acer beTouch E110 and Samsung Galaxy 5 I5503. Micromax is rumored to be launching its Android phone and Spice has launched its Mi 300 which costs around 10K.

Input

Touch screens dominate the Android phone segment in India. All the 33 phones have a touch screen as a input device. Of the touch screens 25 of the Android phones are capacitive touch screens and 8 are resistive touch screens. 6 phones have Touch screen + a full blown QWERTY keypad and one phone (Motorola Backflip) has a flipped out QWERTY keypad along with a touch screen.

Android Version

16 devices are running Android Eclair (2.1) and one device – LG Optimus One – is running Android Froyo. The OS versions are the versions with which these devices were launched. The devices might have received their latest upgrades and could as well be running Eclair or Froyo. And this doesn’t even look at the fragmentation, Android OS is notorious for. For example, Motorola uses its own skin called MotoBlur to differentiate itself from the rest.