Bharti Airtel today announced its partnership with search giant Google to bring low-cost smartphones powered by Android Oreo (Go Edition) platform to the Indian market and enable more Indians to get online. Indian smartphone brands such as Micromax and Lava has showcased their Android Go edition smartphones at the ongoing Mobile World Congress tech show in Barcelona. Airtel has partnered with Micromax and Lava to bring the Android Go edition smartphones to the Indian market under its initiative 'Mera Pehla Smartphone.' Airtel also confirmed that these smartphones come with all the Airtel apps such as MyAirtel App, Airtel TV and Wynk Music preinstalled.
Google, at the MWC show, displayed two new Android Oreo (Go Edition) smartphones- Micromax Bharat Go and Lava Z50. Both the devices are expected to make its way into the Indian market very soon, and Airtel will offer cashback offers on both the device, like how it's offering right now.
The Micromax Bharat Go was said to be launched last month on January 26, but that didn't happen. So expect the company to make an announcement very soon. Google's aim with Android Oreo (Go Edition) is to bring the millions of feature phone users to smartphones, and these Android Go devices should be the ideal ones with basic hardware and affordable price.
Airtel did not disclose any cashback offer details today, but we're expecting the telco to announce the same on the launch day of either of these phones. Notably, India will be one of the first countries to commercially get the devices running Android Oreo (Go Edition) smartphones.
That said, specifications of these Android Go devices will be very basic. For example, the Nokia 1 Android Go device sports a 4.5-inch FWVGA display, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. And the Micromax Bharat Go smartphone said to feature similar specifications.
Google announced the Android Oreo (Go Edition) back at its developer conference last year and had already rolled out basic applications such as Google Go, Maps Go, Gmail Go, YouTube Go, etc. to support the platform. All these applications will come preinstalled with smartphones, and Google says these applications will use less memory and RAM when compared to standard Android smartphones.
