Taiwanese chip company MediaTek, which indirectly led to the boom in low-priced Indian-branded mobile phones with its chips, has launched a new Android platform for companies. Phones based on the platform will hit the market before March-end, the company said.
The MT6575 platform has a 1GHz processor based on Cortex-A9 technology from Britain’s ARM Holdings and runs the latest “Ice-Cream Sandwich” Android 4.0 release. It also has 3G/HSPA and a PowerVRTM SGX Series5 GPU.
The new chipset will also support 720p high-definition video playback and recording, 8MP still camera and high-resolution displays with 960 pixels length and 540 in width.
At that display-resolution, such phones will be able to better the specifications of some of the most expensive high end phones from the likes of Samsung and Nokia. The latest iPhone, for example, has a display of 960 x 640 pixels.
It will also have hot swap dual-SIM facility
The launch means that Indian and Chinese brands will soon be able to launch their own high-end Android phones. At present, nearly all the phones in the market run Android 2 series operating system.
The company seemed to be targeting phones with wholesale prices under US$190 (Rs 9,500).
“We expect significant growth in entry and mid-level smartphones, with wholesale prices under US$190, over the coming years. We forecast that this segment will almost triple in size from 191 million shipments in 2012 to 551 million by 2016.
“At that time, we also expect approximately 75% of those entry and mid-level smartphones to ship to emerging markets,” said Neil Mawston, Executive Director, Global Wireless Practice, at Strategy Analytics.
The MT6575 offered over 35% improvement for browser applications and over 20% improvement in graphics capabilities for gaming when compared to competitors’ best offerings in these segments, the company said.