The mobile era in India. That’s our topic in short.

The longer version: India, as the world’s second largest country by population, as a country with 970 million mobile phone users, 10% of this number being smartphone users, naturally presents itself to all companies in the mobile industry as an attractive – in fact, one of the most attractive – growth markets for phones. Because while saturation to some extent in both the feature mobile phone era and now the smartphone era has been reached in both the West and China, India is still developing, and most people still don’t have smartphones.

The result? A concentration in India, an organised effort by the manufacturers the likes of which were never seen before. That’s why you have companies like Xiaomi eager to take more and more benefits and sales from a penetration strategy in India’s smartphone market. That’s why global conglomerate giant Samsung is struggling to defend its number one position from local company Micromax.

What does this mean for consumers? A lot of things. The first thing is that you have lots of phones. Choice. Competition. The adoption of mobile phones has been so fast that analysts say it is as if the PC era never existed and India skipped it. That’s how strong the onset of the mobile era has been.

And then you read news of how major e-commerce giants like Flipkart are moving to an app-only shopping experience, leaving PCs out to dry, thanks to the astonishing speed of adoption of smartphones.

You have phones starting from INR 600 all the way to INR 80,000 ($10 to $1200). You have smartphones starting from INR 3000, reducing cost of access but the experience still isn’t where it should be.

There are budget phones, there are mid-range phones, and then there are flagship phones. There are international phones from the major global manufacturers, there are phones from expanding Chinese manufacturers, and then there are local phones made by Indian companies like Micromax (these phones are also Chinese but that’s a topic for another day).

You have things like fluctuating prices, higher prices each year for flagship phones, but also the emergence of the ‘value-for-money’ affordable smartphone sector, and a highly variable after-sales service for all companies to say the least.

All the different variables make things tough when it comes to the simple task of buying a new phone, or another mobile device.

It’s because lot of confusion still exists for users. Marketing isn’t enough. Reviews, on their own, are also not enough. Phones are complex devices.

Is spending merely $200 / INR 12,000 enough to get a great experience, or is a flagship phone necessary? What’s the difference between something like the Snapdragon 801 and an Exynos and a MediaTek chip?  Should I go for a bigger display or a smaller one? What do all these acronyms like IPS, AMOLED, SoC, ISO, eMMC mean? And one of the most popular: is this phone better than another phone?

You get the idea.

While international review sites are great at understanding the phones by reading their reviews in the Western market, there is still a lot of way to go to fully understand our Indian phone market. It is because the Indian phone market is unique, and there are many phones available here which are not available there. This fact changes the whole equation. Case in point: phones from Chinese manufacturers like Lenovo and all the Indian manufacturers like Karbonn, Lava, Spice, etc.

So there you have it. Announcing MobiKraze: a new resource including phone opinions, in-depth analysis, reviews and news tailored specifically for the Indian market.

The objective is to analyse the phones available in the Indian market, to write opinions and to review them, and to educate the buyers about which phone should be purchased, which phone can be better etc. Along the way we’ll also double-down on other devices such as tablets, convertibles, etc.

You won’t see cookie-cutter articles and general click-bait in here. Superficiality is something we don’t stand for. What you will see, though, is in-depth analysis, 3000+ word reviews, a lot of opinions backed up by objective facts, objective and subjective comparisons, use in the real world instead of theoretical benchmarking.

Wanting to see how this new phone performs when its reviews are not available internationally? That’s what we’re here for. After our analysis, you won’t wait for another superficial review.

This is just the start. Confusion regarding the mobile era – that’s what we’re here to gradually eradicate, that’s what will be our job.