India Will Ship 210M Mobile Handsets In 2011: Cybermedia Research

India"s mobile handset market is expected to grow by 25 per cent in volume this year to reach 210 million units, market research firm CyberMedia Research predicts.

IDC India was recently renamed Cybermedia Research and is a wholly owned subsidiary of media house Cyber Media India Ltd.

According to the firm, the number of handsets shipped in India in 2009 was 119 million and in 2010 it was 167 million units.

Smartphones will form only 5.7% of the handset market in 2011 and will reach 12 million (compared to the 210 million handsets overall) units, the research says. It defines smartphones as mobile devices with "evolved" operating systems, including Symbian Series 60, Android OS, iPhone OS, Blackberry OS and Linux.

These devices run applications faster and offer users PC-like functionality. These phones have casino online ended the need to carry a separate PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and a mobile phone. Users can browse the Internet, check mail, blog, share photographs, update their status on social networking sites, play games, and download applications with their smartphones. Till the end of 2010, a top-end smartphone used to be equipped with a 1GHz processor. Starting 2011, we will see more dual core processors, the research firm says.

CyberMedia Research"s telecom analysts label these gadgets as the "second wave" of smartphones as they become capable of performing multiple functions.

The research firm predicts the market will witness more excitement on the CPU front, with the launch of multi-core processor based smartphones by a number of mobile phone vendors by end 2011.