Huawei, a major Chinese telecom player, will enter the CDMA market in India with Open Market Handsets.
A Huawei spokesperson said, “We will be launching few CDMA OMH (open market handsets) starting June this year.” He however refused to disclose further details.
Until now, Huawei has sold its CDMA phones either through Tata Indicom or through Reliance Communications’ CDMA arm, but now the handsets will work on three CDMA players’ networks, MTS being the third.
Huawei has a wide range of CDMA handsets in its portfolio thanks to China being a major CDMA market. The company will come up with Android and touch screen Brew (Qualcomm’s OS) based phones.
Currently Huawei has only one handset in the Indian market. This is an Android based phone called IDEOS. The company has Android based tablets in other markets that are likely to be launched in India. However, there has been no announcement regarding this.
As far as OMH handsets are concerned, we expect a majority of them to be touchscreen devices and QWERTY keypad phones. We will not be surprised if some of these will have dual SIMs.