Panasonic hoping to bring back lost glory with P51

Panasonic, one of the pioneers in mobile telephony devices,is perhaps in Smartphone muddle today. As the teledensity sees massive surge in India, the Japanese giant has made a comeback with its newly launched P51 Smartphone.
Its foray with a 5-inch Android 4.2 based P51 Smartphone at a premium price of Rs 26,900 is squarely aimed to revive its business.
The specs of newly unveiled P51 are not encouraging, though the company eyes to make a dent in the Indian mobility devices segment.
"As a look-alike of quad-core LG Nexus 4 Smartphone, Panasonic P51 is not well equipped. It's chief features 1.2GHz MediaTek Cortex A7 chipset, 1GB RAM and 2,500 mAh battery," feels gadgets geek Kanwaldeep Singh.

Business&Market founder-analyst Deepak Kumar believes that Panasonic could have served its Smartphone interests better in India by pricing P51 a bit more aggressively to draw potential buyers to shelves. "While its features and specs are not appalling when compared with rival products, the 1GB RAM could disappoint," Kumar added.
While Panasonic feels that Indian Smartphone market is presently at a nascent stage with enormous consumption possibilities. The company opines that the processor speed or brand, is not the only decision making factor amongst consumers. "LG Nexus 4 may have more RAM and faster processor, but P51 is lighter, thinner and more stylish," it argued.
Panasonic India MD Manish Sharma while interacting with CIOL on the competitive edge of newly-launched P51 said that it has bigger 5 inch screen compared to 4.7-inch of LG Nexus 4. "LG Nexus 4 has single SIM, while P51 has dual SIM capability. P51 has SD card slot and hence is flexibile in upgrading storage," he added.
Sharma further said that P51 has bigger battery (2500 mAh) compared to LG Nexus 4 (2100 mAh) and hence, he feels that the former facilitate 500 hours of standby time when compared to 390 hours of LG Nexus 4. P51 has many other features when compared with Google Nexus 4 that gives an advantage to consumers, the company claims.

The company plans to introduce few more Smartphone variants in a price tag ranging between Rs 6,990 and Rs 35,990 over a period next couple of months. Panasonic is expecting to sell out 2 million devices by 2014 and also aims high with nudging 8 per cent market share.
"Smartphone is an important category of our business expansion plans in India. Considering this is a new front of business in India, our aim is to develop our strengths in the personal usage category," concluded Sharma.