Homegrown smartphone brand Smartron will launch a flagship product in the Indian market in Q2 2018. Speaking with bloggers at Smartron's office in Hyderabad, Narsi Reddy, the co-founder and managing director at Smartron has confirmed the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC will power the company's flagship product, further quoting that they are already in talks with Qualcomm on the same. With this flagship product, Smartron will be looking to compete with the likes of OnePlus and Xiaomi which will also be launching their respective flagship products during Q2 2018.
OnePlus has confirmed its upcoming flagship product launch at the end of Q2 2018, while Xiaomi may launch the Mi 7 in April 2018. Just yesterday, Smartron launched a budget smartphone, dubbed Smartron t.phone P. The company priced the device aggressively at Rs 7,999 putting it against the likes of Xiaomi Redmi 4 and Tenor E.
As stated, the flagship product will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, which will also give Smartron to include its machine learning and tronX features. In recent times, Indian smartphone brands are not able to match Chinese companies in terms of offering features and especially in the pricing scenario.
Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Coolpad, Lenovo always outsmarted Indian brands in the value for money criteria. Notably, Smartron was the only brand to give a tough fight to Chinese brands with the srt.phone, and now with the Smartron t.phone P. However, Narsi Reddy did not reveal anything about the pricing of this upcoming flagship device. But going by current scenario, the device will be priced aggressively and hopefully, it will compete with the forthcoming OnePlus flagship device.
At the moment, the company is working on its IoT platform tronX, which will be soon out to users in the form of beta. And Narsi Reddy also confirmed that Smartron srt.phone would receive Android 8.0 Oreo very soon as they are already testing the latest iteration internally. He also confirmed that the newly announced tphone P would receive Oreo update too in the future. However, when asked about Project Treble support for the srt.phone, he said the company would test it out, and if it works out well, they will be adding the Treble support to the device.
