India gets a new Xiaomi competitor

Building a hardware business is hard, unless maybe if you’re in China. In India, talk to any startup worth its seed funding, and one is regaled with stories of regulatory hiccups, unavailability of parts, lack of an ecosystem, and even lack of enthusiasm among investors, who have typically showered more love on software or ecommerce companies.

Things changed in India when Micromax dared to go where no one had gone before, opening up the floodgates for a number of indigenous smartphone companies that today give global brands like Samsung and Apple some tough competition.

The market is flooded with substandard devices.

Rising demand for smartphones and immense data consumption has quickly propelled India to the position of the world’s second biggest smartphone market, depending on who you ask.

There are about 150 different smartphone brands available in India for sale, Tarun Pathak, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research told Tech in Asia. And yet, the constant refrain has been that the market is flooded with substandard devices that only exist because Indians still like to buy cheap gadgets.

That makes it harder for new phone companies to differentiate themselves, especially in a post-Xiaomi world, where respectable hardware for affordable prices is not a differentiator any more.

From the looks of it, Bangalore-based Creo, formerly known as Teewe, has approached the market from a slightly different perspective.

The company launched its first smartphone, the Mark 1 on Wednesday, complete with some impressive hardware specs and a jazzy show.

But instead of flooding the market with yet another affordable (read, cheap-hardware enabled) smartphone, the company is playing out its other strength – an Android skin that draws from the community to offer one update every month.

Yet another smartphone?

Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Priced at about US$300, the Mark 1 is only slightly cheaper than the Xiaomi’s Mi5, and comes with some cool features like The Retriever, which detects theft, and Echo, which answers your calls for you when you can’t. (We’ll have to play with the phone for some time before we can say if it works).

The phone runs an Android skin called FUEL OS. It comes with a metal body, is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 on both sides and 2.5D curves, has a 5.5-inch screen and a Quad HD display yielding 534 PPI.

Big challenges