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Multi-mode cell phones
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Cell phones today boasts of a variety of features
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Photo: K.R. Deepak
Trendy Cellphone with features of a mini laptop
They double up as a music player, capture the memories of beautiful moments just in a click, keep reminders for you, check your mail and help you to connect to the world outside. And yes…you can talk too. Cell-phones today have metamorphosed into a multi-tasking agent that boasts of a variety of features that can be accessed just by the press of a button. India’s burgeoning cellphone statistics — nearly 230 million mobile handsets are in use today — have created special needs and customer wish lists. Students, businessmen, professionals, housewives – there are models suitable for everyone. With new models being launched every other day, gizmo freaks have a wide range of choice in the markets.
And the market is expanding like never before. Says P. Mohan Prasad of Cell Point, “On an average, more than 10 new models of cell-phones are launched every month from the basic to the high-range ones.” Youngsters mostly prefer the music phones such as Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phones, Nokia’s N-Series phones and a few models of Motorola that are flooding the airwaves. These phones are equipped with mp3 player technology and polyphonic sound systems that could give iPods and other mp3 players a run for their money. Sony Ericsson’s latest model of W580i is becoming quite popular because of its ‘shape your music’ tag. You can skip to the next song by simply shaking the handset. The other unique handset attracting many youngsters is the P1i touch screen handset, which has features of a mini laptop. “This is the first of its kind in the mobile market and comes with a keyboard as well,” he says.
Nokia too has brought out a varied range of handsets in different price ranges. The latest to catch attention is Nokia 5310 that comes with an enticing tag of ‘the world’s slimmest phone’. The handset that has a width of just 9.9 mm is equipped with a 2 MP camera, MP3 player that can run non-stop for 18 hours and up to 4 GB expandable memory. The N95 and 6110 Navigator handsets are also the latest ones that come with a wide range of features.
Business phones
The merge of computing and communication features seems to have gone as far as it can go with today’s technology with the entry of a special class of business phones brought out by leading cell-phone manufacturers like Nokia. The Nokia E90 model launched three months ago is like a mini-laptop. It supports GPS and LAN connection, has a ‘qwerty’ keyboard and comes with a 160 MB inbuilt memory. “It has the ability to directly access the Internet where ever WiFi hotspots are available. You can give presentations also. In short, it is just like a laptop,” says Prasad. The other model of Nokia in this category is the E61i, which is a sleeker handset and also supports Blackberry services.
The latest entry into the cell-phone market is the range of handsets from China. While the craze for these sets is high due to the low cost, these phones are more like the ‘use and throw’ types.
The spare parts of the cell phones are not available in the Indian markets and the sets tend to conk off often, say cell-phone dealers. The battery backup is also not sufficient. But the only USP of the cell-phones is its varied range of features that comes at an unbelievably low cost.
NIVEDITA GANGULY
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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