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Mobile Phones in India

posted 2007-03-14 15:34:24
by Eric Silberstein

Just sat through a very interesting presentation at LISA Forum Asia from Nokia on localizing phones for the Indian market. If I understood right Nokia has 70% of the Indian cell phone market. One useful localized feature they introduced is the "torch-light”…which translated into American English would be flashlight. The electricity frequently goes out in many parts of India and so having a flashlight built into your cell phone is really convenient. It’s actually a feature that they should reverse localize to their non-Indian models…how many times have you navigated a dark room by the glow of your screen?

They’ve also localized their phones into nine Indian languages…Hindi, Gujaratai, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Kannada and a few others I can’t remember. This is really an incredible feat considering that for some of these languages you still need to jump through hoops just to type and render on a desktop computer. If I understood correctly, not only is the phone interface localized into these nine languages, but Nokia also supports entering text for SMS in these languages. This again is very complex since each language has its own script.

Nokia’s commanding market share in India shows the power of localization. Localization helps you make inroads into a market. As your revenue and experience in the market increase, you have the budget and knowledge to do deeper localization, which leads to more customers, which leads to more revenue!

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