Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei Devices launched cloud-based feature phones, smartphones, and the ‘MediaPad', customised for the Indian market and developed by the company's R&D division in India.

Huawei has launched two smartphones – Huawei Sonic and Huawei IDEOS X3 – both based on its ‘Cloud+' service which gives users 16 GB cloud disk for storage and multi device access. Both handsets are in the sub-Rs 10,000 price range.

The phones offer richer messaging features with Message+ to share text and pictures, Phone Finder to locate, back-up and lock the device, a range of Huawei Apps, and the Cloud+ services for content sharing.

Huawei's 3G feature-phone U5510, comes with the ‘WiFi Hotspot' feature where the phone can be used as a router to connect few other mobile phones and multiple users can access the internet on their phones.

7-inch tablet

The company also MediaPad, a seven-inch Android 3.2 Honeycomb-based tablet, powered by Qualcomm's dual-core 1.2GHz processor, priced at Rs 28,000.

Huawei is targeting the tier-2 and tier-3cities for the features phones and tier-1 and tier-2 cities for the smartphones and the MediaPad, Mr Anand Narang, Marketing Director at Huawei Devices, told Business Line .

“With these launches, we expect to sell over a lakh smart phones in India this year, and expect about 30 per cent growth in revenues over last year,” he said. “We expect to be present in over 35 cities and about 2,500 smartphone outlets by end of the year,” he added.

Huawei Devices will market the products through large format retail stores and is investing to train product promoters in retail outlets who can explain the features of the products and demonstrate it, Mr Narang said.

Huawei has also tied up with online retailers such as Tradus and Flipkart to sell the products.

The products, though designed primarily for the Indian market, also plans to take it to countries such as Brazil, Japan, China, the US and the UK over the coming months.

Huwaei entered the Indian smartphone market about six months ago and has 10 products to offer today. It expects to add another 15 products across smartphones, feature phones, datacards and tablets by the end of next year, Mr Narang said.

Huawei Devices, the $4.5-billion subsidiary of Huwaei Technologies. earns about 10 per cent of its revenues from India and get about 15 per cent of its R&D from its India division.

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