March 11, '09; BANGLORE: Samsung, an aggressive player in the Indian mobile phone market released two drastically different handset series within days of each other this week:

For the entry level or ‘aam junta’ market, Samsung offers new models in its Guru series which include some unique features that hard nosed Indian customers demand: the lowest priced is the Guru1070 ( Rs 1649), a colour phone with a built-in torch – something that is very popular in rural India. The 1100 has in addition a Sudoku game mode and pre-embedded Bollywood ringtones ( Rs 1779). The 1125 ( Rs 2149) has 17 hours of stereo FM playability and like the 1100 allows users to preset a prayer of their choice.

The Guru 1210 ( Rs 2259) enables 12 hours of talk time and a Hinglish data base. The 1310 (Rs 2649) is a clamshell unlike the other candy bars. It includes like some of the others, a call talk time limit per month setter.

The Guru 1410 has dual speakers to play MP3 files; 4 MB expandable to 2 Gb of storage; stereo FM with recording and Bluetooth with a 1 GB card ( Rs 3429)

8MB Touch phone

Also launched in India this week: Samsung’s Pixon M 8800 which has an 8 megapixel camera with advanced features like shake reduction, blink and smile detection, panorama shooting etc. It is made with mobile bloggers in mind and makes file loading and sharing easy, with video recording and TV output for PAL/NTSC.

The Pixon M 8800 has a large 8.1 cm touch screen LCD and the 3G phone includes a qwerty keyboard; the ability to play most standard video formats including MP4 and Divx and HSPA -speed browsing. It is priced Rs 28,750.

Samsung’s earlier touch smart phone, Omnia and the TouchWiz F 480 both came with 5 MB cameras – so the new entrant is a significant hike in the photo specs. With 8 MB and the sort of camera features it boasts, lay users can produce almost professional quality pix for large sized print blowups. Say cheeez!