PDAs and Smartphones making inroads in India

It started with Hi-Tech mobile phones powered by Symbian OS and mobile phones like Nokia 7650, Nokia 3650 which started this trend. Soon Sony Ericsson started shipping P800 and P900 in India and PDA Phones became a craze and a status symbol. Then there came Phones like Ngage and 6600 from Nokia which really did very well with youth.

Youth started using these bigger and bulkier devices instead of popular smaller and lighter devices used earlier. They saw value in audio clippings and streaming video they can enjoy on these phones. Game enthusiasts always had their favorite gaming station in their pocket in form of these smarter phones cum PDAs.

There were advanced devices like Nokia Communicator already available since a long time, but they never caught imagination of our youth primarily because of their high prices.

Recently Airtel introduced Blackberry on their network, which offers you seamless email connectivity anytime, anywhere.

A few days back TataIndicom started offering Ego on their network. Ego is a very advanced device running Pocket PC platform and windows user will definitely love it due to its already familiar windows interface and applications like word, excel, internet explorer and windows media player.

Blackberry and Ego both are relatively expensive than other smartphones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. May be if these companies start offering finance and EMI schemes for these handsets like Reliance does for its mobiles, then they can really become popular among masses. Till then Symbian OS is going to rule the smartphone market in India.

Only major PDA OS yet to be widely available in India is Palm inspite of its Treo Smartphone being very popular in abroad. Palm has acquired China Mobile Soft, a Chinese mobile software company primarily offering Linux based pdas and soon plan to launch a special version of Palm running on top of Linux. Well Palm and Linux is an interesting combination, lets wait and watch what does it do to continuously evolving PDA and Smartphone scenario in India. LG is expected to ship first Palm on Linux handset in the market.

PDA phones/Smartphones really make you more productive personally as well as professionally and this fact is slowing being understood by Indians.

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Related Links:

Nokia - http://nokia.co.in/
Blackberry - http://www.airtelworld.com/blackberry/
O2 - http://www.seeo2.com/web/template/Region.vm?region=in
EGO - http://www.tataindicom.com/misc/ego.asp
Treo - http://www.palm.com/in/products/smartphones/treo600/