TMI survey: LG grabs consumer's attention

One third of the phones that made it to The Mobile Indian's list of Top 25 handsets have dual SIM capabilities.

'The Handset Hotlist' survey in February 2012/02 saw LG Mobiles making its entry into the list for the first time in the last 11 months as one of LG's smartphones made it to the Top 25.

The year 2012/02 seems to have started on a good note for South Korea's LG Electronics, the world's No. 2 TV maker. The company's handset division has registered profit globally in the fourth quarter of 2011, as its latest smartphones helped its ailing handset unit post a small profit after six straight quarters of losses.

The Handset Hotlist is brought out by The Mobile Indian (www.themobileindian.com) every month. It is based on a survey of online preferences of about one million visitors who came to the site in January, 2012/02 and searched for and viewed information about mobiles on the site's Handset section, which lists more than 1,700 models.

Sreekant Khandekar, director, The Mobile Indian, says, "Apart from LG's entry this month, we have seen renewed interest in dual SIM phones and it is spearheaded by Nokia. Five out of nine dual SIM phones featured in the Handset Hotlist are from Nokia. Though Nokia was late to enter this segment, it seems to have finally found momentum."

Khandekar adds, "Another interesting trend seen in the hotlist is that 15 out of the 25 handsets in the list have 3G capabilities, and eight out of them run on Android."

According to The Handset Hotlist for February 2012/02, 11 of the 25 most sought-after mobile handset models are from Nokia. Samsung follows with eight; Sony Ericsson and Micromax have two each; while LG and Spice have one model each.

Nokia C5-03, a Symbian operating system-based handset, was the most searched mobile phone on The Mobile Indian, followed by Samsung's Galaxy Y S5360.

LG Optimus Net, which bagged the fifth place, is the dual SIM version of the Optimus Net and runs on Android v2.3 Gingerbread operating system, with an 800 MHz processor. The phone comes with 512 MB of RAM.

Apart from the LG Optimus Net, six other phones made it to this month's Hotlist for the first time. This includes Micromax Superfone A75, Samsung Wave M S7250, Samsung Wave Y S5380, Nokia X2 02, Nokia Lumia 710 and Spice Mobiles Mi 280.

Top 10 Indian Challengers

Two new handsets from Spice and one from Micromax made it to the Top 10 Indian Challengers list for the first time in February. In all, Micromax bagged six slots, while Spice bagged the remaining four this month.

The Challengers list was introduced in August, 2011. It ranks the 10 most exciting handsets from Indian marketers, and is based on the preferences of visitors in the Handset Guide section of The Mobile Indian.

Commenting on the Challengers list, Khandekar says, "In this month's Challenger list, we saw people interested in Android operating system phones from Indian manufacturers as the top five searched phones were Android smartphones."

This month's top five in the Challengers were Micromax Superfone A75, Micromax A70, Spice Mobiles Mi 280, Spice Mobiles Mi 350n and Micromax A85.