Now Spicy People's Phone

After Tata's people's car, HCL, Zenith’s people's laptop, the Indian telecom giant, Spice has come up with the people's phone. Spice has planned to announce its Sub INR Rs.1000 or USD $20 (roughly £10) phone tomorrow at Barcelona’s Mobile world congress, the world's biggest telecoms conference.

Indian conglomerate Spice has unveiled a new cellphone model priced below $20 to target surging demand for cheap phones in emerging markets in Asia.

Spice will start selling its "People's Phone", which comes without a screen, in Asian markets from Iraq to Indonesia from March, and plans to introduce more phone models in the $10 to $20 price range in the near future, Spice's chairman Bhupendra Kumar Modi told Reuters. All cellphone vendors are eyeing entry to the lowest end of the market, as growth in the rest of the spectrum is expected to slow this year.

So far the sub-30 euro ($43.5) market, which represents 20 per cent of all phones sold globally, has been dominated by the world's largest cellphone maker Nokia. Nokia's cheapest mass market product, Nokia 1110, retails on average for 23 euros on Western European markets, data from research firm CCS Insight showed.

Spice chairman Modi said the company had been able to keep the costs down on its new model as it has not added a screen and other non-essential features. "It is just a phone," Modi told Reuters in an interview. "If things go well we are talking about 10 million phones in the first 12 months. That's our target," he said. A couple of vendors tried in the 1990s to sell phones without screens but they found no mass appeal. Motorola also tried to tackle Nokia's stronghold of the market in the past few years. "Only half of the people in the world use mobile phones at the moment. The problem is the cost of the phone," Modi said, adding a global manufacturing firm would make the first phones in China, but Spice had started to build its own factory.

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According to the Company, it will launch a Braille version of the phone in India. It is also set to reveal the world's first phone to play films on a disc. The People's Phone will be just one of several launches at this week's Barcelona conference. Next-generation handsets and wireless technology are once again set to dominate the conference.

Last month the telecom company unveiled its plans to launch a pilot scheme in India that will let mobile users to make free phone calls as long as they are prepared to listen to a short advertising jingle. The plan is intended to break the monopoly on the market enjoyed by Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar.

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