Smartphones have taken the world by a storm. Everyone has one, or is aspiring to buy one; or if not either, then has surely seen one. Even though Pakistan may not manufacture its own phones, it stands to be applauded for pushing out the bigwigs of the smartphone manufacturing industry and bringing in the adage “Be Pakistani, Buy Pakistani’ into our lives once more – if not for anything else, only phones.
Q-mobile – the enterprise owned by Mian Pervez Akhtar of Allied Electronics, the once importer, assembler, distributor of LG products prior to Q-mobile – is the second most demanded phone in the market right now. The massive advertising that Q mobile is engaged with – even greater than Nokia – makes for a greater exposure for Q mobile, thus making it the success story it is.
This coupled in with the Voice mobile brand, the child brand of United Mobile, with the tagline ‘Get Noticed,’ is already giving tough competition to Chinese manufactured Q mobile. It is one of the emerging mobiles of today providing both style and price fitting snugly into the equation. Smartphones namely Voice Xtreme V70, Voice Xtreme V60, Voice Xtreme V40 and feature phones are quite affordable with a price range starting from as low as Rs. 1600.
The rivalry between the two phones is giving very little space to other pioneer Android-operating smartphones, that being of Samsung and HTC. Billboards splattered with high profile celebrities such as Kareena Kapoor for Q-mobile and the same for Voice are accommodating no one else into the picture but them. The products of Samsung and HTC, though unique are very hard to purchase, being as expensive as 50,000 to a lac.
Samsung and HTC nevertheless are undoubtedly the trend-setters of this field. Whatever they bring out is first copied by Q-Mobile and Voice. If the two manufacturing companies have to step up to the game and become a catalyst for change in the society by providing employment to the masses, it can start by creating technical skills within the country and become a potential mastermind in innovation.
This can be seen as the start of a new era for Pakistan, and Pakistanis in general. With apps and processes being streamlined within the government, the recent uploading of free educational content on Punjab’s educational website, for example, has created a new means for the government to reach out to the masses with. Therefore, with the skills newly induced, private companies too, better take notice. The apps making rounds, from Pakistan, having emerged from the soil itself, have had remarkable effect throughout the world.
Applications developed by Pakistanis, such as iGrill, the maker of which is Fahad Khan, the CEO of Vendevo in USA; LocPro, an application made to decipher location and the most recent one made by students of IBA Larkana – Pakistan News Cloud are becoming popular in not only Pakistan but all over the world. It follows then if apps and locally-manufactured website content can be produced, then why not phones.
True, the two international brands are being thrown out of the picture due to the advertising impact and the availability of cheap phones offered to the masses. However, seeing these home-grown brands taking over the world will be great to find as well! One needs to be one’s own competition, at the end of the day. No doubt investment in Research and Development could lead to better innovation, and therefore, bigger horizons. It would be the ‘smartest’ decision yet.
