Touchy-feely times in mobileland

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: W980i in the Walkman range and C902 Cybershot-5 mega-pixel from the Cyber-shot range,” informs Sudhin Mathur, general manager, Sony Ericsson India.

As per IDC estimates, between April 2007 and March 2008, 4.33 million converged devices were sold in India. While Nokia leads the market in this category, HTC is the number two followed by Motorola and RIM (Blackberry).

According to industry experts, the acceptance of business phones has been growing over the last few years with the need to remain connected on the move. “There has been a growing acceptance of business phones over the last few years. The growth is expected to be exponential in the years to come. According to analysts, India is now the third largest smartphone (enterprise and high-end multimedia devices combined) market in the Asia Pacific region, after Japan and China with over 3.5 million devices shipped over the past one year,” says Devinder Kishore, director, marketing, Nokia India.

As these devices do lot more than just voice, service providers too are betting big on the popularity of the segment. Harit Nagpal, chief marketing officer, Vodafone says, “The intent behind bringing the iPhone to India was not just the margins on the handset, as they are very little. We aim to up our revenues from the data usage.” He adds that though non-data will never form a major component of ARPUs for service providers, however, 3G technology and products like these surely increase the share of it.