Samsung Galaxy SIII at the top of the heap: TMI Survey

Indian mobile consumers are showing an inclination towards bigger screens. Eight of the 25 handsets featured this month have screens that are four inches or larger.

For many in India, it seems that a smartphone is a device based on the Android operating system (OS). This can be gauged by the fact that all the major handset majors - except Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry - and including the Indian brands - have at least one Android smartphone in their portfolio. This consumer sentiment is also reflected in the Handset Hotlist Survey (August, 2012) of The Mobile Indian (www.themobileindian.com), as 18 out of the most searched for 25 handsets are based on the Android platform.

In this month's survey, Nokia's C5 03 relinquished its Numero Uno position to Samsung Galaxy SIII after occupying the slot for a record nine consecutive months. In this Hotlist survey, Nokia C5 03 was the eighth most searched smartphone.

The second position was bagged by Sony Xperia Go, which made its entry into the list soon after its launch. Also, this month's Handset Hotlist saw 13 new entrants, of which nine were Android-based handsets, while one each were based on S40, Java, Belle and BlackBerry OS 6.

In the Handset Hotlist for August 2012, 11 of the top 25 handsets are from Samsung, four from Sony Mobiles, three each from Nokia and LG Mobiles, two from HTC, and one each from Micromax and BlackBerry.

Commenting on the survey, a spokesperson of The Mobile Indian says, "In India, smartphones based on Android 2.3 operating system are still the most sought-after because most handset marketers have not rolled out Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)."

The spokesperson further adds, "The mobile internet experience seems to be among the top priorities for Indian mobile consumers and this explains why eight of the handsets featured this month have a screen size of four inches or bigger."

Besides Android, consumers also showed interest in phones with good camera capabilities. According to the survey's findings, as many as 18 of the top 25 most-searched phones came with a camera resolution of 5 mega pixel or more. Little wonder then that the leader of camera phones, the Nokia 808 Pureview, which comes with a 41 mega pixel resolution, bagged the fourth place in the list.

The Handset Hotlist Survey (August, 2012) is based on a study of online preferences of about one million people who visited the website (themobileindian.com) in July, 2012 and searched for and viewed information about mobiles on the site's 'Compare Mobiles' section, which lists about 2,000 models. In this month's Hotlist, we have introduced a popularity index, where the No. 1 handset has 100 per cent popularity.