G’FIVE, one of the new mobile brands to make its presence felt in India, has announced that it will soon launch Android tablets priced at Rs 10,000 or less. Currently, branded tablets cost Rs 15,000 or more in India, including the iPad, which costs around Rs 30,000 and the Samsung Galaxy tab which costs upwards of Rs 23,000.
G’FIVE, which was in the news last year for knocking out Samsung Electronics to take the second place in mobile sales in India, is a Chinese brand that has grabbed a small part of the Indian mobile market over the last two years.
The company typically makes mid-range phones costing around Rs 3,000-6,000 and frequently offers models that look like the more costly phones from Blackberry, Nokia etc..
In a statement, the company said it plans to “shatter the price barrier” by launching the tablet. Though tablets are available for as little as Rs 7,000 from the grey market, they suffer from an assortment of problems related to poor hardware — such as low battery life, poor touch-display and the absence of 3G connectivity.
G’FIVE, unlike players like Spice Mobile and Videocon Mobile, is not an Indian company that relies on Chinese manufacturers or operations. It is one of the biggest OEMs or electronic manufacturing brands in China.
G’FIVE has ambitious plans for launching other consumer electronic products in 2011 as well including tablet computing devices, net books, laptops, music boxes, digital photo frames etc, it said.
It was declared one of the top 10 mobile phone brands globally as per Gartner’s Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users in 2Q10 while the International Data Corporation (IDC) India declared it the second largest selling mobile phone brand in India after Nokia in 3Q 2010.
In India, it is estimated to be comparable in size to Micromax, Spice etc..