South Korean tech giant Samsung launched a new smartphone - Galaxy J3 - priced at Rs 8,990, designed specifically for bike riders in India. Interestingly, 70 per cent of Samsung India's entry-level consumers are two-wheeler users.
The handset features a 'S Bike mode' that has been developed by the India team. Once activated, callers are notified using an automated answering machine that the user is riding and cannot take the call.
The caller can choose to press 1 to express urgency to speak to the biker. When the caller presses 1, the rider will be notified of the incoming call. He may then choose to take the call after safely stopping the bike.
"We are working on bringing in meaningful innovations that make people's lives better. While studying the consumers' phone usage behaviour, we realised that incoming calls are a major distraction to bikers.
"About 70 per cent of our users in India are two-wheeler users...This feature is our effort to promote responsible riding," Samsung India Senior Vice President Asim Warsi said. He added that 20,000 man hours went into developing the NFC-enabled feature that is integrated into the hardware of the new handset.
"We have received interest from other emerging countries and will look at the possibility of taking it to these markets. Also, we are exploring extending this to our other mass and mid-segment 4G devices in India," Samsung India Director Mobile business Manu Sharma said.
The handset will be available exclusively on eCommerce platform, Snapdeal.
The J3 features a 5-inch display, 1.5 GHz quad core processor, 1.5GB RAM and 8GB memory (expandable upto 128GB). It also features 8MP rear and 5MP front camera as well as 2,600 mAh battery.
Sharma said the J series has done extremely well for the company and has "changed the landscape", especially with its ultra data saving feature.
"The J series accounts for about 20 per cent of the industry's smartphone sales in value terms already as per syndicated industry reports," he added but declined to comment on how significant is the contribution to the company's own sales.
Apart from J3, Samsung has 3 4G devices (J2, J5 and J7) and 2 3G devices in its portfolio its J series.