Long-lasting battery key to India cell phone

Aug. 18, 2010 - PRLog -- http://www.laptop-battery.org
Micromax Informatics Ltd. co-founder Vikas Jain drew inspiration for the company's first phone from a line of Indian villagers standing in the midday heat to get their cell phones charged by a man with a car battery mounted on a bicycle. Their homes had no electricity.

In response, the company designed its first model, the X1i, with an oversized battery, a small screen, and tweaked electronics that made the phone run for as long as five days, and on standby for as many as 30 days.

"It was really the most obvious thing to do," said Jain, who co-founded the company in 1991 with three friends. "Here was something that provided customers a feature nobody else had bothered to give them - battery life."

Micromax now sells about 1 million handsets a month, with 37 models tailored to local tastes. The company has about 4 percent of the $6.3 billion Indian market, eating into the sales of Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, whose share in India fell to 52 percent by the end of last year from 64 percent in 2008.
Few phones have Wi-Fi

Micromax's phones start at $40 and few of them sport Wi-Fi, 3G, or GPS capabilities. That keeps costs down in a country with sporadic Internet access and little 3G coverage. One phone doubles as a Nintendo Wii-like controller, allowing users to play games on a television game console. Another, marketed heavily with Bollywood-themed TV commercials, has costume jewelry embedded in it and swivels open to reveal a full keyboard.

Closely held Micromax's approach has attracted interest from Boston-based TA Associates Inc., a $16 billion private equity fund that invested $45 million in the company in January for an undisclosed stake.

"We did spend a lot of time with the broader universe of Indian phone makers," said Naveen Wadhera, a TA Associates Advisory director based in Mumbai who worked on the deal. "But what we specifically wanted was someone with a real focus on product and a real effort at innovating. The others have a bit of a 'me-too' sort of strategy."
Assault on Nokia

Micromax has led the assault on Nokia by Indian phone makers, which as a group have grabbed 14 percent of the market, according to research by Indian trade magazine Voice&Data. Nokia isn't giving up on the market.

A decline in low-end handset sales in India, Nokia's second-largest market by revenue, may present Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who unveiled a 40 percent drop in second-quarter profit in July, with further challenges.

The fact that each Nokia phone spends nearly 18 months in development, and the fact that Nokia makes phones for sale across the world rather than tailored to Indian tastes, may help Micromax continue to steal customers, says Naveen Mishra, lead telecommunications analyst at research firm IDC India.

Micromax takes no more than four months to go from idea to execution, says Jain. Its $75 Qwerty-keyboard phone is already India's best-selling full keyboard handset, according to IDC, beating Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry, whose cheapest unit goes for $320. Nokia plans to launch a similar phone, the C3, that will be cheaper than Micromax's, as part of a midrange series of phones.

One of Micromax's greatest successes has been a feature that allows phones to handle multiple accounts. In India, mobile plans are mostly prepaid and, thanks to an ongoing price war, among the cheapest in the world and getting cheaper.

Consumers often wind up with three or more accounts as callers shop around for the best deal offered by each carrier. Nearly 100 million Indians have multiple cell numbers, estimates investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd. To switch between numbers, cell phone owners used to have to swap SIM cards, the little plastic-and-metal identifier chips that slide into handsets.
Phones can hold 2 SIMs

Micromax has designed almost all of its phones to hold two SIMs, and handsets that can have up to two numbers are now part of its signature. One of its phones comes with a motion sensor so that all a user has to do to switch SIMs is briefly flip the phone upside down.

Nokia will introduce its own dual-SIM phone soon, promises Nokia India Vice President and Managing Director D. Shivakumar, more than a year after Micromax introduced its first model.

laptop battery: http://www.laptop-battery.org

# # #

http://www.laptop-battery.org sell high quality and low, discount price laptop batteries,notebook batteries, digital camera batteries, Cordless Drill Batteries, camcorder batteries, laptop AC/DC adapters and battery chargers. etc