14 DAY TRIAL // Philips is not really a newcomer on the Indian smartphone market, it’s just not a popular handset manufacturer in this country. However, the company plans to change that by launching three new Android smartphones and a feature phone that will go on sale in the coming days.
There’s nothing wrong with launching three Android mid-range smartphones at the same time, but the bad news is all three seem to be overpriced.
Philips S308, W3500 and W6610 will be available in India in the next couple of days and Android fans will be able to pick them for Rs 8,290 ($140 / €105), Rs 16,195 ($275 / €200) and Rs 20,650 ($350 / €255), respectively.
Unfortunately, customers in India won’t be impressed by the specs of these mid-range Android smartphones, on the contrary. For example, all three devices are powered by Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box and are likely to remain stuck on this version until they get discontinued.
The better-featured of the three, Philips W6610 sports a large 5-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports qHD (960 x 540 pixels) resolution.
The phone also packs an enhanced 8-megapixel photo snapper on the back with autofocus, LED flash and video recording, as well as a secondary 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.
The W6610 is powered by a 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582 processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory, which can be further expanded up to 32GB via microSD memory card.
The only selling point of the smartphone could be the huge 5300 mAh battery, which should provide up to 33 hours of talk time.
Next in line, Philips W3500 runs the same version of Android, namely Jelly Bean 4.2, and sports a similar size 5-inch display that supports only FWVGA (854 x 480 pixels) resolution.
Last but not least, Philips S308 is more of an entry-level smartphone that will ship with the same Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box.
As fonearena points out, all three smartphones offer dual-SIM capability with dual standby support, along with a range of connectivity options such as 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS with A-GPS.