Tata Teleservices launches low cost handset

Tata Teleservices, parent company of Tata Indicom mobile services, has launched the MotoFone F3c in India, the first global unveiling of this ultra low cost handset for the code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular service.

The phone is being offered at Rs. 1,699 all-inclusive and for this price, Tata Indicom is throwing in a prepaid SIM with free incoming calls for a year.

The super-slim Motorola design, just 9 mm thick and weighing just 75 grams, comes with a proprietary high contrast display, over four hours of talk time and eight days of standby on a full charge and Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada and 84 localised polyphonic ringtones.

The low cost of the handset was made possible by a Qualcomm system-on-a-chip, the QSC 6010, which integrates audio, radio and power management functions on a single slab of silicon. Indian engineers working in the Hyderabad development centre of the U.S.-based Qualcomm contributed to the chip's software, the while crucial hardware design was done at the company's Bangalore laboratory.

Kanwalinder Singh, Qualcomm President for India and SAARC, told The Hindu that the QSC 6010 was the first in a series of single chip solutions aimed at fuelling compellingly priced `value platforms' with increasing features — adding music and camera — and ultimately full `3G' functionality.

Tata Teleservices CEO Darryl Green said the company was seeing quick ramp-up in Karnataka where it had just crossed one million customers and in Delhi where it had crossed two million. Nationwide, it counted over 15 million subscribers — and hoped that offerings like the MotoFone (it hoped to sell 2-3 million units of this handset in 2007) would make for a compelling proposition.