Intex plans new products, better customer support

Unveils its new flagship Intex Aqua Ace

Home-grown mobile handset manufacturer Intex, which has risen lately in the domestic pecking order in terms of sales, is now turning its focus on better customer support services. The company on Wednesday unveiled its new flagship Intex Aqua Ace, with a one-year screen breakage warranty, at Rs 12,999.

“Under the new initiative we will replace the display or the phone,” said Sanjay Kalirona, head of mobile business, Intex Technologies. The one-year breakage guarantee will be available for select phones in the festival season, while Aqua Ace will have it throughout. 

Intex also announced a 15-day service guarantee. Keshav Bansal, the company’s director said if it took more than 15 days to fix a phone at an Intex service centre, the company would replace it with a new device. Currently Intex has 50 exclusive service centres in the country.

The Aqua Ace smartphone comes with a 3GB RAM and 16GB internal memory, expandable to up to 128 GB. The phone has a 5-inch HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection on both front and back panels. 

The smartphone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system and is powered by 1.3GHz quadcore MediaTek processor. The Aqua Ace is a dual-SIM smartphone with 4G LTE connection support. The OS will be upgraded to Android 6.0 Marshmallow in December.

The phone has a 13-megapixel (MP) primary camera with LED flash and a 5-MP front camera. Taking photos while shooting video is a new feature that Intex has brought. The phone is powered by a 2,300 mAh battery.

The company had earlier announced investing Rs 1,000 crore in smartphone manufacturing in India. The company plans to set up a two-million-square-foot manufacturing unit in Greater Noida with a capacity to produce 35 million handests. Around 50 per cent of smartphone components will be manufactured by Intex. For the rest, the company plans to use Indian-made components. “The ecosystem in India is suitable for making new initiatives. Components like chipset, display and 50-60 per cent of components will be manufactured by the company,” Kalirona said.

Intex is also planning a tie-up with Airtel and Reliance Jio Infocomm in future. “Most of our new devices will come with Airtel SIM cards and will support Voice over LTE (VoLTE); after November, all our phones will support VoLTE,” said Kalirona.

The company was also planning to develop a SmartOS with MediaTek for its wearable device, iRist, which currently had a good market in Europe, especially Spain, said Bansal at the launch. The company is also looking to announce fitness bands with displays in due course.