Huawei Ideos U8150 has become a household name in Kenya. Its been a year and 3 months since it was introduced into the market on a subsidized plan by Huawei and Safaricom. It has since seen the adoption of android phones and smartphone use rose in Kenya. The Huawei Ideos is marking its 130,000th sale this month, a huge leap of an introductory device. A huge number of smartphone users in the country own the Huawei Ideos U8150 which save for the battery life, offers a good smartphone experence. Its the phone of choice to many entry level users in Kenya, and is still being sold by Safaricom at Kshs 9,000. Huawei now has a new slogan “let’s simply share” first captured the market by affordability of device, gaining numbers and trust of brand while at it. This gave Huawei good leverage when they later introduces other devices like the Huawei U8800 X5 at a higher price point of Kshs 25000 and the Huawei S7 slim at Kshs 32000. Huawei Kenya CEO Herman He noted, and I quote:
“The phenomenal sales witnessed are as a result of intensive marketing campaign on the multimedia offering that comes with a Smart Phone. The rapid technological changes and increased mobile internet use across the globe has also led to the high demand and uptake for Smart Phones. Through this Huawei has ensured that everyone has access to smart phones at a reasonable price while ensuring they are user friendly.”
Huawei has a huge plan for this market, which includes a marketing budget of Kshs. 100 million for the year 2012 and also introduce three devices, Huawei Vision, Huawei Honour and Huawei Media pad. So we should expect to see much from Huawei come January. Huawei vision is a 3.7″ curved display capacitive multitouch smartphone with 5mp camera autofocus, 1GHz processor with a 1400mAh battery. Huawei Honour packs a 4 inch touchscreen, a single-core 1.4GHz processor, 8MP camera autofocus, front camera, android 2.3 and a 1930mAh battery. Huawei MediaPad was the world’s first tablet to be announced with Android Honeycomb 3.2. It has a 7 inch capacitive, multi-touch screen, a 1.2GHz dual core Qualcomm processor, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel front camera. Has a 4100mAH battery.It als flaunts a 32 Gb capacity microSD slot, internal memory of 4Gb, wi-fi and HDMI out.
