The Mobile Device

The mobile appliance is no sizzler in India, if you look at

CE handhelds, PDAs and the Palm genre. We’ll finally see some respectable

growth there, from miniscule annual sales of 5,000 or so. But the real growth

will continue to be in cellphones, both for voice and data. SMS usage will grow

the highest. WAP will come in but with minimal usage, if Airtel’s abysmally

slow Tango service is any preview. WAP will be really usable only with GPRS, and

a few networks will launch that too.

The hottest selling handsets will continue to be compact

handsets at the Rs 10,000 price level, with a premium on compactness and battery

life–and not on WAP.

Notebooks, too, are a tiny fraction of total PC sales in

India, unlike the trend in much of the world. They’ll continue to be small,

but we expect to see growth ramping up, especially for low-cost multimedia

notebooks on one hand, and ultra-portables of the Portege and ThinkPad 240

genre, to a lesser extent. DQ