The cheapest smartphone available today in India costs slightly over Rs 4,000. With smartphone prices crashing and even tier-one brands joining the entry-level smartphone space, one would naturally assume these are the final nails in the coffin of simple feature phones. But feature phones still remain relevant in India where less than 20 percent of all phones sold this year will be smartphones.
Even if smartphone sales double next year like it has been for the past two years, the sheer installed base of feature phones will ensure that they will remain to be relevant at least for the next three to four years. Add to it the cellphone replacement cycle in India, which still hovers around two years in the entry-level segment and one can get a fair idea of how long it will take to convert feature phone users into using smartphones.
Packing in the most
“Majority of our users are using feature phones, some of them using three to four year old models. We have noticed that these users also come to our platform more frequently and spend more time on our games than smartphone users,” said Deepak Abbot, Vice President - Product Management, Reliance Entertainment - Digital. “We have to ensure that we have games that run not only on smartphones but also on the most basic phones,” he added.
Unlike developed and many South East Asian countries, India’s Internet boom is yet to happen. For most users their first brush with Internet is likely to be on a cellphone rather than a PC and they are not accustomed to downloading apps. Many first-time users intuitively go to a Web browser to access sites like Facebook or check emails rather than having an app for them. Facebook too realises this and has started a programme in India that would give Rs 50 worth of free talktime to new users who sign up for a Facebook account from their mobile phones.
Budget basics
“I classify phones as smartphones and smart-enough phones. While smartphone users would buy apps, users of smart-enough phones typically are the ones that use value added services that are delivered by carriers. These smart-enough phones are the only entertainment devices for many that drives content usage,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO One97, a mobile Internet company that also provides services to almost every carrier in India.
To illustrate Sharma’s point, one just needs to look at the success of Nokia’s Asha series of devices. In the last quarter alone, Nokia shipped 6.5 million units of its all-touch Asha phones. These phones are exactly what smart-enough phones are meant to be - not complicated to use like a smartphone but have a decent Web browser and enough services to keep users entertained. Nokia claims users download a million songs everyday or 16 songs per second from its online music store, with a majority of them coming from feature phones. Users of Asha 200 and Asha 305 phones alone download more than seven albums every month.
“These devices are shaping the consumer's Internet experience by developing affordable web and applications for the next billion consumers. This segment has a huge uptake from the consumers and is one of our key differentiators in India,” said Viral Oza, Director Marketing, Nokia India.
Bare necessities
Most feature phones today offer some of the basic “necessities” that would otherwise drive a user to buy an entry-level smartphone. Both Facebook and Twitter tied up with MediaTek to ensure their apps are pre-installed at a system level on all feature phones running on the latter’s platform. Almost every Indian handset vendor uses MediaTek’s chipset and reference design for their feature phones. Opera, a mobile browser that compresses web browsing data, is another app that is found pre-installed on these devices. This helps users to browse the Internet without incurring heavy Internet data costs. WhatsApp, an uber popular cross-platform mobile messaging service that is often called as BlackBerry Messenger alternative for non-BlackBerry users, has also recognised that smart-enough phones are here to stay for a while. The company recently launched a version of its app compatible with S40 (short for Series 40), the operating system that powers Nokia’s feature phones including the Asha series.
“We recognised early that there are a lot of S40 phones out there in the world and it was important for us to not only have a S40 client but also do a great job of providing an experience similar to what we provide on smartphone platforms. We are happy with the adoption we are getting on the S40 platform and we will continue to invest in making our S40 client better over time,” said Neeraj Arora, Head of Business, WhatsApp.
It would be foolish to suggest that smartphone users won’t increase in India in the coming months and years but it won’t be prudent to write off the smart-enough phone users that currently exist and will continue to co-exist.
(The writer is executive editor of www.bgr.in)