Office on your fingertips

TECHNOLOGY: A British comunications company has warmed up to competition and launched two high-end smart phone models.

Smartphone handset vendor O2 Asia Pacific has a lot of activity going on in its backyard ( read India). From a fairly inactive state, the company has finally decided to launch two high-end PDA models before the curtains fall on 2006, and has appointed a new national distributor, Brightpoint, which will extend O2's reach to 32,000 retail outlets across 2,700 Indian cities.

O2 Asia Pacific , a part of O2 group (a well known name in mobile communications in Europe), has also named Myilravanan Nathar as its country manager (sales) for India.

Sean Wilkins, chief financial officer, O2 Asia Pacific, revealed plans to launch eight new PDA and smartphone handsets in 2007 along with two company owned concept stores in India "to facilitate an interaction between the consumers and the brand." A £6.683 billion strong company, O2 has no intentions of launching products that cater to the mass market.

Says Wilkins, "According to IDC, O2 Asia Pacific captured a third of the worldwide Windows mobile converged mobile device market, which makes O2 the top vendor of worldwide Microsoft OS-based converged mobiles."

The company is betting big on 3G, adds Nathar, "We will focus on marketing 3G handsets heavily in India and with four 3G PDA phones on the anvil for Indian consumers, it indicates our strategy for 2007."

The newly launched Xda Atom Exec is priced at Rs 41,900 and Xda Stealth will retail at Rs 32,990 and will be available at Brightpoint India outlets in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune and Chandigarh initially.

Xda Stealth, that combines both a touchscreen and an alphanumeric keypad, is positioned as a device for texters while Xda Atom Exec is tagged as a mobile office that packs in a sleek infrared keyboard.

"If you're a frequent traveller, you will also love the auto configurator utility which detects operator settings on individual SIM cards and configures the device accordingly. It's all about plug-and-play," claims Wilkins.

Asia has approximately 900 million mobile phone subscribers and it is expected that by 2007 at least 19 million subscribers would be smart phone and PDA users.

According to a research agency, only 7.4 million smart phones were shipped in the region in the first half of 2006, but sales picked up and scaled 11 million in the second half.

"The Indian smartphone subscribers are a slim percentage of a 150 strong mobile population, but the situation will change with adoption of 3G networks," hopes Wilkins.

The continuous functional improvement of smartphones, the introduction of mid-range PDA models, better designs, enriched third-party applications, and more high-speed wireless connectivity in public and private locations will help people graduate to smart phone segment faster.

British communications company O2 has already unveiled its first batch of 3G devices for 2007 at Gitex 2006 in Dubai, with the sole intention of giving the Blackberrys and other PDAs by HP, Treo a run for their money in the smart phone market throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

These forthcoming launches promise a first dual processor PDA-phone and combined with Nvidia's GoForce 5500 chip for graphics. All models are expected to have built-in 2-megapixel cameras, support for 802.11b/g wireless networking and they won't come cheap, adds Wilkins.