The Android platform has grown three fold since the last year. And its presence and acceptance in the Indian market as well has grown by leaps and bounds.
The mindshare enjoyed by Android phones in India is much higher than the 9.4% market share enjoyed by it among the new phone shipments. Unfortunately, there are not many reports available about them specific to the Indian market. That is why we teamed up with folks at MySmartPrice.com to do a detailed study of android phones in India.
Android Phones By Manufacturer
There are no surprises in this dataset. The Indian market is dominated by Samsung which has the largest number of models at 13. It is closely followed by HTC and Motorola. Among the Indian companies, Spice & Micromax has already introduced Android phones. Indian Manufacturers like Spice and Micromax also have Android models present in the market.
Note: Videcon Zeus has been discontinued from the market and is no longer available in stores.
Android Phones By Price Range
We were aware that the availability of mobile phones at sub 15k is large. However, the fact, that more than 50% of Android mobiles are available below Rs. 15k, came as a mild surprise to us and underlines the fact as to why does Android have better acceptance and sales as compared to iOS devices which starts on from the Rs. 20,000 range and above only. The wide range of price points for Android phones (Rs. 5200 for Spice Mi-270 to Rs. 29,500 for HTC Sensation) reinforced our bullishness on the growth of Android phones in India.
The real surprise is in the presence of companies across different price ranges. While the overall list was dominated by Samsung, the scenario at different price ranges is quite dynamic.
- The sub Rs 10,000 range is lead by Samsung (6 out of 22 mobiles) followed by LG (4 mobiles) and Motorola (3 phones). HTC is completely absent from this price range
- The Rs 10,000 -15,000 segment has fierce competition between Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Acer with 3 mobiles each
- The higher end of the price range (Rs 15,000 – Rs 20,000 and Rs 20,000 – Rs 25,000) has most offerings from by HTC
Distribution of Android Mobiles by OS version
The latest version on the Android platform is v2.3 which is currently being offered by only three major manufacturers i.e. HTC, Sony and Samsung. Also, surprising is the fact that there are a substantial number of models of primitive versions v1.5 & v1.6 as well present in the market. Google is all set to take the leap to Ice-cream Sandwich next quarter, and we wonder how this graph would look then. For now, there are as many as 37 models on the market running either Android 2.1 or 2.2, some Gingerbread love would do great here. There are 11 models with Android 1.6 & 1.5, which are unlikely to be updated anymore.
Distribution of Android Mobiles by OS version (before and after considering upgrades)
The Indian market is definitely quite slow when it comes to getting upgrades by the manufacturers. Out of the 49 models released with OS versions v2.2 and below only 21 handsets have been upgraded which comes to only 43% of the total handsets. Froyo is the most popular launch with 22 models. Only 7 of these have got a Gingerbread update. A total of 9 handsets released with Android 2.3 in India.
Camera Quality among Android Phones in India
We observed that 5 MP camera is now the most commonly used among the Android handsets in the Indian market, which is in sync with the overall international market as well. Though there has been a steady increase in the number of 8 MP cameras, as well. A total of 20 handsets still run 2MP – 3.2MP, with most new launches happening with a 5 Megapixel camera, the 5+ Megapixel number would only grow from here.
Price Range for different camera quality among android phones
From the graph: it is clearly visible that 8 MP camera equipped are costly and are only available from a starting range of Rs. 19,525. Though it was indeed surprising to note that 5 MP camera phones in India have a starting range from as low as Rs. 7,328.
The analysis has thrown up a lot of facts out in the open about Android phones in India. We will come up with more detailed analysis of other factors in the Android landscape pretty soon in the near future.
In case you have any questions, or there is something specific you would like to know feel free to email me at tassavur [at ] onlygizmos.com
