Spice to launch 5-inch Android phone for under Rs. 15,000

The past year or so has seen large smartphones, ones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note that have a 5.3-inch screen. Of course, these smartphones are priced well above the Rs. 30,000 bracket. Spice Mobiles, a local smartphone manufacturer has decided to launch their own 5-inch smartphone. This was told to Mobile Indian, while explaining some of the plans for the near future. There are some other phones that are set for launch, starting with screen sizes of 2.8-inches and a price of Rs. 5,000. There’s no information on the hardware being used on these devices or the prices, but the first of t he new set of smartphones is expected to hit the Indian market in the next two weeks. What is known however is that the phones will come bundled with Android 2.3 and we expect some of the higher spec’d ones to be upgradeable to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

5-inch smartphone for under 15k to be a reality soon

Some of the other features that one can expect on the phones is pretty standard - WiFi capability with tethering support, along with GPS while some phones will have dual-SIM functionality as well. Spice has been in the news for their Android smartphone offerings at very affordable prices. For example, their Spice Mi-410 was very popular back then. Around the time we reviewed it, Spice happened to be the first to break the sub-15K price barrier with a 1GHz processor on an Android phone. The phone offers tremendous value and has made other companies stand up and take notice. For its lower price, you were getting a larger screen and a faster processor.

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Now, Spice might be looking to repeat the success by launching a 5-inch screen smartphone for under Rs. 15,000. Sure, we might find not the same finesse or quality in the device that we find on say, a Rs. 30,000 device, but it’s sure to attract quite some attention. A typical Rs. 15,000 Android smartphone today comes with 3.5 to 3.7-inch screen running a 1GHz single-core processor. Spice might shake things a bit by just bringing in a larger screen, the resolution of course is most likely going to touch 1280x720. We haven’t really heard of too many devices that come with lower resolution displays on 5-inch screens. With the launch of some of these phones in the very near future, all we can do is wait and see if the 5-inch phone is one of the first to hit the market.