Mxit, South Africa’s mobile social network, together with winning World Cup Indian cricket coach, Gary Kirsten, has announced the launch and availability of its mobile instant messenger application in India. Mxit enables users to avail features even on non-smartphones. Mxit is a feature phone user’s key to unlock functions usually reserved for smart phones.
A simple prerequisite of a basic data connection enables a feature phone user to experience smart phone features by downloading the app. Mxit breaks the norm of exclusivity to smart phones, making an array of apps and games available for any Mxit user, said a Mxit release. Mxit is available for download across more than 8,000 different feature phones, smartphones and tablets.
It will provide the growing 550 million feature phones users across India with the ability to affordably use their basic data-enabled feature phone like a smartphone, with advanced functionality for chat, browsing the Internet and accessing apps and games. The platform is both fast and data light allowing users with even the most basic 2G connection to benefit from an immersive social mobile chat experience, at a much lower cost than the average SMS, the release added.
Sam Rufus Nallaraj, CEO of Mxit India Pvt. Ltd. commented, “India is currently the world’s largest feature phone market and continues to grow. Launching Mxit brings innovative mobile technology to the masses making the ‘smartphone’ experience affordable to every Indian consumer. We’re excited at the prospect of enhancing the lives of Indians by providing functionality otherwise not available to low end handset users, as well as replacing the reliance on SMS on feature phones with a cheaper, more engaging chat alternative.”
Available on Java, Nokia, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows phone operating systems, it allows 300+ characters as compared to 140 characters in a SMS. It even works on basic 2G connection with limited memory and is fast & data light in its functioning. Mxit is customized for each user as per their region.
Currently available in English and Hindi, the team is working towards offering 10 Indian languages (Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Assamese and Oriya) within six months. Gary Kirsten commented, “I am honored to be chosen as an ambassador for Mxit’s Indian launch. From what I’ve seen in South Africa, access to the information and services available through Mxit is potentially life changing to people not currently connected.
Mxit is an excellent platform to facilitate this.” Roger Grobler, Chairman of Mxit India said, “Currently, 46% of mobile internet users in South Africa are active on Mxit every month. One reason for this is that Mxit is rivaled only by Facebook in terms of the number of makes and models of mobile phones it operates on. Another reason is that Mxit provides access to a rich set of services and information; over and above its core capability of chat.
Launching in India is a highly strategic move for us and under the leadership of Sam Rufus and our world-class Indian team, we have built a highly capable offering, with local content and languages.” Users will also gain free access to mobile education, healthcare and community apps, have the ability to exchange pictures and send chat messages of up to 2,048 characters, providing a gateway to vital information and functionality previously unavailable to feature phone users.
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