Though much details was not revealed of X2 so far, it would be a gaming centric smartphone, with reality flow 120MHz refresh rate (#SmoothAF). There will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor - but no further details was disclosed.
The company will target all price brackets in coming days.
Poco F1 was launched in August '18 and it's still in the market at Rs 14999-16999 (6GB+128GB/8GB+256GB) that's $210-238 approx. It is equipped with flagship chipset from Qualcomm - Snapdragon 845. It's still in demand from audience just like Xiaomi's Mi A3 (Android One), thanks to the high end processor and regular Android updates.
India has recently become the second largest smartphone market across the globe, replacing US. The top spot is still owned by China though. The top five brands in India - Xiaomi, Oppo, Samsung, Realme, Vivo.
Still there is immense opportunity for the handset makers.
Sub brands in smartphone industry is very common practice these days.
- Huawei was probably first big company who rolled out a seperate mid range brand under Honor.
- ZTE has its camera focused subbrand - Nubia since 2012, and created it as subsidiary in 2015. Nubia now operates of its own, as ZTE cut down share in it. Nubia has a gaming centric sub brand in India as well as overseas, Red Magic.
- Lenovo launched 'Zuk' in 2015, and brand was withdrawn in 2017 in the view of promotion of Motorola (bought by Lenovo from Google in 2014). After the acquisition of Motorola, Lenovo also withdrew its own branded smartphones.
- Xiaomi came to India with Mi branded phones only, but affordable Redmi sub brand gave them the much needed success in India. Xiaomi also has its gaming series - Black Shark (not available in India), and launched a flagship killer smartphone - Poco F1 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset in August 2018. Xiaomi has recently detached from the brand Poco (www.poco.in/in/), and spun off an independent company of same name.
- Oppo (www.oppo.com/in/) also launched its sub brand - Realme (www.realme.com/in/) in India,to target mid range smartphone market dominated by Redmi. Realme was an Online exclusive. In early 2019 we heard of Oppo's subbrand Reno would be launched, and Oppo Reno 2 was launched in August 2019.
- Vivo (www.vivo.com/in) has plans to launch gaming oriented sub brand iQoo in China, as well as in India. (www.iqoo.com/in)
- Indian co Micromax has its own sub brand - Yu. But before that Micromax used to sell smartphones with bigger screens under Canvas subbranding.
- Xolo was Lava's sub brand.
While we can see dominance of Chinese brands in India's smartphone market, we see almost no hope for Indian brands to comeback. Their sub brands were not flopped, but there was no sustained investment in R&D. Many experts believe Indian brands were not ready for shock like demonetization, and then Indian market went 3G to 4G overnight as Jio came. The business went mess, and Jio did more mess with its own branded smartphones and JioPhone. Then came the Chinese crowd of brands, they just killed the middlemen! Therefore the fall of the Indian brands was inevitable.
We are fingers crossed to see if any Indian company to do a comeback in this dynamic market.
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