Huawei launches world's 1st cloud phones in India

Telecom equipment maker Huawei on Tuesday launched its much-awaited tablet PC 'MediaPad' and two handsets 'Sonic' and 'Ideos X3' offering cloud services to strengthen its product portfolio in India.

The company, which has just 6-7 devices in its portfolio as of now, is also looking at expanding its product range aggressively in the next few months.

"We launched our devices earlier this year and by December-end, we should have 10-odd devices. India is a very important market for us and we are aggressively expanding our product-line in India.

Next year, the plan is to have 20-30 devices in our portfolio," Huawei marketing director (devices) Anand Narang told PTI.

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The company is also looking at strengthening its retail presence and expects to have 10,000 outlets across more than 50 cities.

To cash in on the burgeoning tablet PC market in India, Huawei has launched MediaPad, a seven-inch Android 3.2 Honeycomb-based tablet.

Powered by Qualcomm's dual-core 1.2GHz processor, MediaPad features a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera and 5MP rear camera. It is priced at Rs 28,359.

"The market for tablet PCs is huge. We expect to sell 5,000 units in the first month and gradually ramping it up as there is a huge potential in the market here," Narang said.

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Experts have forecast that market for Indian tablet PC, which is smaller in size and has PC-like functionalities, will grow to a million units in volume in the next 12 months.

The Indian market is flooded with tablets and consumers have the option of choosing tablet PCs at various price points.

While the bigger brands like Apple's iPad and Research in Motions's PlayBook are priced above Rs 25,000, devices from the likes of Olive and Spice are available at much lower costs.

Huawei has also launched two handsets based on Cloud+ service under which users will get 16 GB cloud disk for storage.

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The phones also offer richer messaging features with Message+, an application developed by Huawei's Indian team, to share texts, pictures, videos and voice notes; Phone Finder to locate, back-up and lock the device; and Cloud Gallery for easy viewing and sharing of pictures.

Huawei Sonic is priced at Rs 9,210, while Ideos X3 is priced at Rs 10,229. Both handsets are powered by Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system.

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Huawei Sonic has a 3.5-inch multi-touch HVGA display, 512 MB on-board storage and 20 GB additional storage (4GB bundled micro SD card and 16GB cloud net drive), while Ideos offers X3 features dual camera (3.2MP and VGA) and 3.2-inch screen.

"In our consumer interactions, we found that while smartphones being better than feature phones, still have limitations. That is where our Cloud+ service offering 16 GB Net drive, integrated social phonebook, richer messaging and phone finder services will make our cloudphones smarter than the existing smartphones," Huawei sales director (devices) P Sanjeev said.