NEW DELHI: South Korean tech giant Samsung today launched a new smartphone — Galaxy J3 — priced at Rs 8,990, designed specifically for bike riders in India.
Interestingly, 70 per cent of Samsung India’s consumers are two-wheeler users.
The handset features a ‘S Bike mode’ that has been developed by the India team. Once activated, callers are notified using an automated answering machine that the user is riding and cannot take the call.
The caller can choose to press 1 to express urgency to speak to the biker. The rider will have to come to a complete halt to answer the call, thereby ensuring his safety.
“We are working on bringing in meaningful innovations that make people’s lives better. While studying the consumers’ phone usage behaviour, we realised that incoming calls are a major distraction to bikers.
“About 70 per cent of our users in India are two-wheeler users…This feature is our effort to promote responsible riding,” Samsung India Senior Vice President Asim Warsi said.
He added that 20,000 man hours went into developing the NFC-enabled feature that is integrated into the hardware of the new handset.
“We have received interest from other emerging countries and will look at the possibility of taking it to these markets. Also, we are exploring extending this to our other mass and mid-segment 4G devices in India,” Samsung India Director Mobile business Manu Sharma said.(Agencies)