New Delhi Taxi driver Haricharan would not change his humble function phone for any hello-fi cellphone.
“I will start chats (on facebook Messenger) without delay from the browser. On a cellphone, you want to have two apps. also, you grow to be paying a good deal greater (for a cellphone), and the battery doesn’t even remain 24 hours… My (characteristic) smartphone could pass on a single rate for two days,” says Hariharan.
“Every now and then I haven't any time to rate my smartphone, considering the fact that I make numerous trips from Ramnagar to Corbett at some point of peak seasons.”
If you are questioning that Haricharan is an exception in a nation of a billion folks that could vouch for their smartphones, you're in for a wonder.
Round sixty-four% of Indians nevertheless opt for function phones.
“Thirds of the Indian population use feature telephones,” Faisal Kawoosa,The lead of telecoms studies wing at CyberMedia studies, advised HT.
Consistent with our evaluation, India has 750 million unique subscribers and smartphones account for best 36% of them (277 million). The remaining 473 million still use characteristic telephones.”
Organizations also are trying to tap the pool of the ‘digitally underprivileged’ to grow their coins base, in particular in the wake of the authorities' demonetisation force.
“With demonetisation, each enterprise might be compelled to observe growing alternatives for the digitally underprivileged. this can also see the characteristic telephone phase develop lower back as nicely,” Kawoosa introduced.
E-wallets Paytm, Mobikwik and innoz.in have already started paintings to connect humans to the internet.
Pa has devised measures to permit feature telephone customers to take gain of its app’s offerings; ultimate week MobiKwik released MobiKwik Lite, which allows customers on 2G connections/edge to transact.
MobiKwik founder Bipin Preet Singh has stated that the corporation becomes working on an instantaneous feature smartphone service, which it expects to launch within weeks. The employer has hinted that the carrier will run on u.s. codes -- digit combos utilized by telcos, along with Airtel, Vodafone, and idea, to present statistics approximately recharges, validity and other cost-delivered offerings.
In fact, both Paytm and MobiKwik are operating on answers in order to paintings even without the net.
“All transactions that take place in the offline mode might be saved inside the cache reminiscence of the app and as soon as the phone comes in touch with the net, the registry of these transactions will be updated on our server,” said Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
A MobiKwik spokesperson additionally showed that the business enterprise was running on a similar model for a completely offline mode.
Us of a’s largest lender, state bank of India, also these days released a brand new wallet app for feature cellphone customers. called Batu, the app has been established on the traces of buddy — the phone wallet app for SBI customers.
“Now not anybody has a phone and that is why we concept of this model,” SBI handling director Rajnish Kumar stated. Batum may be used for making application payments, moving budget and shopping for air tickets, among different matters.
“The Innoz SMS platform (a search engine for offline users through SMS) has processed over 1 billion queries of users in 10 international locations,” a spokesperson for Innoz said. “In no SMS App store has enabled hundreds of thousands of human beings to use FB, Twitter, email and other net services offline.”
Tarun Pathak, who leads customer gadgets studies at Counterpoint, stated that “in spite of the ongoing conversion from function phones to smartphones, the volume of the characteristic telephone marketplace in India will be large sufficient until to 3 years from now.”
“Characteristic telephones might be essential for digital payments since the mounting base of characteristic phones in India continues to be close to four hundred million. The authorities wish to study approaches to push those 400 million-ordinary users to undertake cashless transactions via their characteristic phones.”
Arto Nummela, CEO of HMD global, which plans to come out with Nokia-branded handsets quickly, also sees a huge call for characteristic phones globally, and now not handiest in India. “There can be a consistent demand for characteristic telephones as many human beings don’t want to switch to a cellphone, whether it's miles for price or revel in. We trust there'll always be a fifteen% to 20% demand in the phone phase.”
Google and facebook also are working on exceptional methods to deliver the internet to human beings even if they're no longer linked to the internet.