Indian makers have been giving their Chinese counterparts a serious run for their money. This cat-and-mouse game has gotten even more intense in the last few months, which is when Indian manufacturers really upped their game to match levels set by the Chinese.
Celkon is one such Indian OEM that’s been rising through the ranks through the last few months. The company today announced the Millennium Ultra Q500, a smartphone that’s made to battle out the ASUS Zenfone’s rise in the Indian market. The Zenfone 5 came a few weeks back, and has taken the market by storm since, with its surprisingly high VFM ratio
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While Celkon hasn’t revealed complete specifications of the Millennium Ultra Q500, we know for certain that the phone will come with a 5-inch HD display, a quad-core processor (presumably the MT6582), 2GB of RAM, 16GB on-board storage, expandable via microSD and Android KitKat.
All this makes for quite a budget phone. A 9,999 INR ($163) price tag makes it even better, head-to-head with the ASUS Zenfone 5!
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Buying an indian brand smartphone is an increasingly difficult proposition, when phones with similar if not better specs are available from well known international brands are available in the same price slab. Read Motorola, Asus and Xiaomi they provide better build quality, software updates and better after sales. Sure they are not available in stores but quite a large chunk of the indian population has access to the internet these days.
Abir, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve owned a number of Chinese smartphones and my finding is that ALL those that use a MediaTek SoC have problems of some kind. Sad, but I had to learn the hard way that neither of my $250 Elephone P8’s can compete with the build quality and reliability of even budget Korean built phones. That’s the reason why we never see MediaTek based phones sold by US or European carriers. They’re just not reliable enough. All premium Chinese phones are based on the Snapdragon SoC. Even Xiaomi decided to stop using the MediaTek 6592 on their new RedMi Note in favor of a LTE capable Snapdragon SoC. Now, Xiaomi doesn’t sell any phones in their product line-up that use a MediaTek SoC.