Micromax expands its Unite range with the launch of the Unite 4 and Unite 4 Pro smartphones with an aim to support a variety of Indian languages at the system level. When it was first launched, the target consumers were from smaller towns and semi-urban areas. The domestic handset maker wants to target the untapped non-English speaking consumers with its latest Unite series smartphones.
Shubhajit Sen, Chief Marketing Officer, Micromax Informatics, highlights company’s interest to cater the untapped vernacular smartphone market, and Micromax’s partnership with Indus OS.
Sen revealed that the Unite series has been one of the “most successful product lines” for Micromax, with over 2.5 million units sold till date, and in one year of partnership, there have been 35 Micromax smartphones featuring Indus OS.
Read Also: Micromax Aims Top Slot; Revamps Brand Strategy
“We have been talking about this for a fairly long time and we think language and vernacular in India is much underserved when it comes to digital. There’s this problem of consumers not getting vernacular digital content,” said Sen.
“In our estimate from user research, 40 per cent of all WhatsApp messages are now written in vernacular and talking about Twitter, 2 out of 10 top trends on Twitter are non-English,” added Sen. “We have successful history when it comes to language phones. The Unite series for us has been single most successful range for Micromax and we have sold over 2.5 million units,” further added.
87 per cent users choose to use Indus OS on Micromax smartphones despite being offered an option to choose the stock Android UI. Sen added that 97 per cent of consumers, despite being offered an option to switch to the Google keyboard app, continued using the Indus OS keyboard.
Read Also: Micromax Opens New Manufacturing Unit In Telangana
Some features from the latest Indus OS 2.0 include Indus Swipe, hybrid keyboard, and text-to-speech, among others. One of the highlight features of the new Indus OS 2.0 is that it comes with offline text-to-speech function that works currently for Hindi language. The Indus OS 2.0 now comes with deeper integration when compared to the first iteration, and is much more than just a launcher, according to Deshmukh. Earlier, Indus OS supported 10 languages but the new version supports 12, having added Assamese and Urdu. The new Indus OS version also gets a nifty new transliteration feature that lets users type in English, and have it automatically converted into the Hindi (or any chosen language) script. The transliteration feature has been already available in Google keyboard and Facebook apps, but with Indus OS 2.0, it will be available system-wide, in any app.29