The Hindu Business Line : ‘Smart’ brew

Some think it’s a coffee shop. They aren’t our target audience,” says Vinod Lunked of PDA Café with a wry smile. This new store at the Forum mall in Bangalore is one with a difference. Four LCD TVs stare up at you from the floor, playing ads, while shiny black PDAs gleam at you from the shelves. “Anybody can open a mobile shop. We decided to stick to smart phones and PDAs, seeing the rising interest and demand from Indian executives,” say s Lunked.

He got the idea after seeing the likes of PDA King while travelling abroad. Being a distributor of PDA brands in the country, it was an easy decision to set up shop on his own. PDAs, or personal digital assistants, are brick-like mobiles that do more than just place calls.

They double as a laptop — offering applications such as spreadsheets, email clients, WiFi connectivity, organiser and even GPS. The primary difference between a smartphone and a PDA is that the latter has a touchscreen, and hence more expensive.

Lunked spent a year trying to convince Forum Mall owners in Bangalore to allot him the space. “We chose malls as they get high footfalls. We see around 200 walk-ins compared to 30-40 in a standalone store,” he says. The cost is much higher though. An investment of Rs 8-10 lakhs was made for the in-mall store, almost double what he would have spent normally.

Over 2.5 lakh citizens enter Forum mall per week. He plans to set up two more such stores in Bangalore by year end, including one in Whitefield.

In two months’ time, one more will spring up in Ampa Mall in Chennai, and then he will go to Pune. He hopes to set up two-three stores in the top eight cities in India to reach out to all the aspiring buyers.

PDA Cafe sells five brands including the latest - Chinese maker HTC, which has tied up with Airtel to offer an iPhone-like touchscreen smartphone. It costs Rs 20,000 and Lunked says he has sold 400 in one week.

Others include O2, i-mate, HP (iPAQ series) and Blackberry.

He also plans to import phones from Gigabyte and Dell.

Spending behaviour on mobiles has changed over the years with more Indians opting for smartphones. While smartphones are lower priced, non-touchscreen models that are being bought by those who want to upgrade from an entry-level phone, PDAs have a restricted target buyer: top-level executives. All over India, there are only 20,000 PDAs being sold, says Lunked.

Falling prices of hardware have meant that smartphones now costs 50 per cent less than they used to last year.

Now smartphones with most functions are available from Rs 11,000 to Rs 60,000, he says. He predicted that Windows-based smartphones would be a “hit” in India with the popularity of Windows OS in personal computers (which in turn implies that synchronising address books and contact, mails, is an easier task).

When you go mobile shopping, do you find yourself torn between what you need, desire and if it is really the best option for you? Most of us are riddled with doubts and often end up postponing the decision to buy.

To counter this, Lunked plans to develop a software that will ask a few questions on your profession and usage parameters, budget, and so on and display two or three mobile models that will best suit you. “It will also showcase the power of a PDA,” he says. The software will be ready in a month’s time.

PDA Cafe is also going online, with the same software that will help surfers make the right choice. Pdacafe.in will be one of the first sites in the country to sell PDAs. It will also have community forums where users can share software, write reviews, and collaborate. Maybe with that the next level of executives, and not just those at the top, can be seen sporting PDAs.

More Stories on : Retailing | Telecommunications | Karnataka

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