Freedom 251 | India Freelancers Blog

Mobile phones in India: 1 Billion and counting

February 27, 2016

Freedom 251, Freelancers, mobile phones, Samsung

India is the 2nd largest mobile telephone market in the world with over 1 Billion mobile telephones registered. By size, China is the first and the United States, Brazil and Russia are third, forth and fifth respectively. Brazil is third? Yes, Brazil is third.

With such a large command of the world mobile telephone market, India is starting to be taken quite seriously by the world mobile telephone providers. In India, the mobile phone market share is now moving away from the governmental providers to the private providers. The Mobile Carrier Market Share in India is 24% AirTel, 19% Vodafone, 17% Idea and 11% Reliance. That means that between the four largest mobile telephone carriers, they hold 71% of the market of the world’s second largest mobile telephone market. These are important statistics to know.

Programmers on IndiaFreelancers.com would be smart to move into coding and creating programs which run on mobile telephones. According to the trade group GSMA and the Mobile World Congress which starts today February 27th, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, by the end of this year 2016, mobile telephones will account for 50% of all mobile connections world wide. Increasingly, the Android platform is the one in which more and more mobile phones are based. Thus, if our programmers on IndiaFreelancers.com wish to be relevant to the almost 7 Billion mobile telephone users world wide, they would do well to be active in producing apps and coding for mobile telephones.

These are enormous numbers. If we think of the fact that in Indonesia, which has a population of 237 million people, there are approximately 237 million registered mobile telephones! That means that there is one mobile telephone in Indonesia for every man, woman and child in Indonesia – and worldwide, this trend is only continuing to rise, not decrease.

Therefore, we at IndiaFreelancers.com encourage our programmers and developers to please do all you can to become as proficient as possible at writing code and programming for mobile telephones. These devices are not only the future – they are the present.

Ranjiv P for IndiaFreelancers.com

New Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 edge to be launched in India in March

February 25, 2016

IndiaFreelancers

Freedom 251, Mobile telephones, Ringing Bells, Samsung

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Samsung, the electronics giant, just announced that it will launch the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge mobile telephones in India this coming March 2016. The key point here, of course, is that the price is reported to be approximately 49,000 Rupees for the Galaxy S7 and 55,000 Rupees for the S7 Edge.

Why is this significant? Well, if we look back on our blog entry of just a few days ago, we wrote about the new mobile telephone introduced by the company called “Ringing Bells” called the Freedom 251 phone which sold for just 251 Rupees! Unbelievable but true. Samsung is selling a mobile telephone for 49,000 Rupees and Ringing Bells is selling a mobile telephone for just 251 Rupees. No wonder there is such a commotion these days in the mobile telephone world. The price for the Samsung mobile phone is 195 X the price for the Ringing Bells mobile phone!

We at IndiaFreelancers.com have been watching with great interest and amusement (?) to see what finally happens with these “mobile phone wars” as it were. To charge a little less is one thing, but to charge 195 times less is unbelievable – yet that is exactly what Ringing Bells proposed to do.

Whatever happens with the “mobile phone wars”, it will be important to watch. No one would pay 49,000 Rupees if they can just pay about 300 Rupees for a decent mobile telephone. But its not that easy. The authorities in India are investigating Ringing Bells. They want to make sure that the company is legitimate and that they are able to deliver what they say they can deliver.

Please keep watching this blog. We will keep an eye on these things for you and will keep you informed.

Ranjiv P for IndiaFreelancers.com

Freedom 251 phones: A Freelancer Opportunity

February 18, 2016

IndiaFreelancers

Freedom 251, Freelancers

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When the Noida-based “Ringing Bells” company launched India’s most affordable smart phone yesterday, the Freedom 251 smarphone for Rs251, the demand was so high that the company’s website crashed and has been unable to sell smart phones for hours.

A smart phone priced at Rs251 which is, as the website Independent.co.uk quotes, as being valued “about as much a cup of coffee” was sure to have a mass appeal. Indeed that has been the case. The furor over such an inexpensive smart phone has not gone unnoticed by the various regulatory agencies. Indeed, the ICA (Indian Cellular Association) wrote to TeleCom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad saying that the rate for this phone could not conceivably be below Rs 3,500 – even after a subsidized sale. And yet here it is. A smart phone featuring a 4-inch display, with a 960 x 540 pixels resolution, a 3.2MP rear facing camera and a 0.3 MP front facing camera. Its connectivity features include 3G capability, WiFi connectivity, Bluetooth, a GPS and an amazing 1,450 mAh battery all running on an Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system with a Qualcomm 1.3-GHz quad-core processor and 1 GB RAM and 8GB of internal storage which can be expanded further up to 32GB using a microSD card. It is just unimaginable that such a device with such features is possible at such a price – and yet here it is for just Rs 251!

Life is all about the disruptors. When electricity was developed, the kerosene lamp industry fought it as being a dangerous new thing which could electrocute people. When Alexander Graham Bell tried to sell his new invention, the telephone, to AT&T he was told that it was a “nice toy” but that no one would ever use it. When Henry Ford tried to sell his idea for an internal combustion vehicle called an automobile, the industry “experts” of the time told him that this new vehicle was “cute” but that “the horse and buggy are here to stay.” Disruptors have always and will always upset the status quo. That is why they are called disruptors. Change is difficult for humans. We like life to remain predictable, known and comfortable. There is a saying that “the only one who likes change is a wet baby” and yet change is what life and living are all about.

We at IndiaFreelancers.com say “let’s embrace change” rather than wish it was not happening. If indeed the Rs 251 mobile telephone is here to stay, lets create programs for it. Lets develop apps for it and lets become familiar with it. If the Ringing Bells website crashed because it was receiving “6 Lacs hits per second” (600,000 hits per second), this tells us that the likelihood is that the Freedome 251 – and/or others similar to it – are here to stay and we should learn to code and develop for them and their inevitable subsequent copies – rather than resist them.

Ranjiv P for Indiafreelancers.com