The popularity of camera-enabled cell phones has ensured that such handsets constitute about 33% of the total handsets available in India. Anshul Gupta, an analyst with Gartner India, stated, ?The year 2004 marked the beginning of the trend of phones with camera. By the year 2007, nearly half of the handsets available in the market in India were camera phone-enabled. This number saw an uphill trend in 2008 where nearly 2/3rd of the handsets available in the Indian market were camera-enabled.? Handset manufacturers have discovered higher growth in low-end phones and hence they began attracting the low-end users by offering them camera enabled phones for as low as Rs 3,000.
India had a total mobile subscriber base of 375 million as on February 2009. However, a person might own more than one mobile phone, especially in the metros, so determining the number of handsets in the market becomes difficult.
Higher demand for the mobile with camera led to its higher production which further distributed the R&D cost. Hence, the cost per handset reduced and made it affordable for a low-end user. Also, the declining chip prices have led even the basic phone to be camer-enabled now. Observing the surge in the demand for camera-enabled mobile phones, manufacturers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung have joined the league to innovate such cell phones. While Nokia, the market leader in handsets, has phones with 8MP camera in its portfolio, competitors like Samsung, has already launched the 10MP camera phone and Sony Ericsson, a 12MP camera phone with ?smile detector technology?.
?Today, the question is not of a handset being camera enabled or not but it is about the quality, clarity and resolution of the camera. But in the rural areas and amongst the low-end users, camera enabled mobile phones have become a basic necessity,? stated Usha Rajeev, leader telecom practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers , India. For such users, the mobile manufacturers have embedded Video Graphics Array (VGA) camera.