China’s Huawei Devices will now have its own cloud services and cloud-based mobile phones in India. With a starting price of Rs 9,000, the two new handsets — Huawei Sonic and IDEOS X3 — can download and enable content sharing, while backing up information on the cloud.
After unveiling the first GSM handset in June, the company has sold over 100,000 such handsets.
Cloud computing provides applications from a server, and these are executed and managed by a client's web browser.
Anand Narang, marketing director, Huawei Devices, said, “In our consumer interactions, we found while smartphones were better than feature phones, they had their limitations. That is where our Cloud+ service, offering 16 Gb net drive, integrated social phonebook, richer messaging and phone finder services, would step in. These would make our cloudphones smarter than existing ones.”
Huawei's service is similar to Apple's iCloud service, which was introduced in June for iPhone users.
Huawei Cloud+ service would offer 16 Gb cloud storage, along with integrated features like Huawei Streams for a social phonebook experience, Huawei App Store for popular Indian and global apps and over-the-air solution for operating system upgrades. The Huawei devices are bundled with a 3 Gb download for three months with Aircel, and would be available in general retail and online stores and large format retailers across the country.
The company has also unveiled a seven-inch Android tablet PC, the MediaPad, targeted at mobile professionals. This would be available for Rs 28,359.
Huawei's Bangalore research and development centre has developed an app called Message+ that allows users to exchange pictures, sound files and data files over text messages. “We understand the need to make the product appealing to Indian users and hence, we would be closely watching what apps users like and pre-bundle these in future devices,” said Narang. Currently, the company is expanding its retail presence from 300 stores to 2,000 outlets by the end of this year.
P Sanjeev, sales director, Huawei Devices, said, “Both Huawei Sonic and IDEOS X3 have received resounding sales success worldwide. We are confident of being able to achieve our objective of being among the top five original equipment manufacturer handset brand, both in India and worldwide, over the next three years.”
The company is also set to launch a range of 3G feature phones, priced between Rs 4,500 and Rs 7,000.
