Smartphones for Rs 10,000 soon!

"We are developing a product, a smartphone, to hit below the Rs 10,000 mark. We hope to launch it in the next six months," HTC India country manager Ajay Sharma said.

The HTC smartphones are now available at price points of Rs 11,500 to Rs 34,000, which is competitive to those manufactured by firms like Blackberry and Nokia.

Last year, the company sold about 10 million devices world over. "India remains to be our fastest growing market and the sales in second half of 2007 grew by as much as 300 per cent over the first half," Sharma said.

"We have set ourselves an ambitious target of one million smartphones in India by 2009," he added.

Earlier, HTC announced its foray into CDMA technology in a tie-up with Reliance Communications. HTC launched two new devices - HTC P3000 and HTC S720 - exclusively for Reliance customers.

RCom president S P Shukla said the alliance was in line with our intent to offer high-end devices to customers to help them access email, internet and data applications on the move.

HTC president Peter Chou said India was an important market for the company and it will launch many more products shortly.