To heck with Vodafone, have a dekko at Digibee

WHILE THE spotlight has been trained heavily on Vodafone's attempted entry into the Indian market via Hutch, Digibee is attempting to take the Indian handset market by storm ke hokar Ceva.

DGB Microsystems - to give it its shubh nam - claims to be India's first mobile device design and manufacturing company and recently announced financing of $ 8.5 million from two VCs.

The company hopes to provide everything from real entry-level basic mono GSM and CDMA handsets right up to advanced 3G handsets whilst ensuring they are fully customised for the region's requirements.

In doing so it has decided to pick Ceva's single chip integrated baseband and applications processor - the X1620 - for its high end GSM/3G handsets and go for the TeakLite II DSP chip for the low cost models.

By selecting Ceva's DSP design and software, Digibee is hoping to significantly reduce its time to market. While it has offices in both the USA and China, the company's handset R&D and Indian marketing team are based in Bangalore and Chennai.

Component procurement and global manufacturing appear to be based in China. The INQ couldn't find any claims of the number of handsets shipped to date. Clearly, though, it is set on becoming India's answer to Nokia. µ

L'INQ
Digibee