It appears that HMD wants to focus on Human-Mobile interaction and experience to carve out a space.
HMD introduced Crest smartphones in which it announced Crest and Crest Max. HMD is not a new brand, but yes it will be a new customer facing name. I somewhere liked its introduction in the market with ‘Crest’, which truly reflects it as a symbol having long history, clearly sending out a message that it’s not a newly born brand. It has a legacy to build upon.
It’s too premature to comment on how the market will react. But this time HMD has widened its net. This means potentially it no longer would appeal to a niche. There was a misalignment in ‘Nokia’ by HMD. The smartphones were trying to leverage their clean and stock interface free from any kind of bloatware, which does not only hamper the experience but also risks privacy and security. While people to bother about experience, privacy and security, but privacy and security become serious buying factors only in luxe (₹50,000 and above) category. That’s the evolved user who definitely considers the security and privacy angles while evaluating a smartphone. This is where Apple has earned credibility and continues to reap its benefits. Samsung has also to some extent layered it with Knoxx assurance.
Nokia by HMD was an attempt to bring durability & longevity in featurephones and bloatware free stock Android experiences to consumers. In featurephones it worked. However, Nokia by HMD did not stop there. It kept on adding smarter elements to a featurephone and today we have payments, YouTube, etc., as some of the applications that work on a featurephone often dubbed as a ‘dumb’ phone. In smartphones the security and privacy does not have a mass appeal, and the segments where it matters people have more reliable options from Apple and Samsung. Also, the issue is about the ‘tangibalisation’ of security. As consumers we understand security and privacy through applications, a layer over and above operating system. This concept of having bare Android was contrary to this basic belief that there has to be a layer of protection over and above.
Now HMD has recalibrated its strategy. While security and privacy will continue to be on their priority, they will not perhaps make it their KSP or Key selling proposition. Rather, they will focus on areas where the Human-Mobile interface and experience can be bettered. This is what can be inferred and interpreted with the launch of Crest and Crest Max. The whole conversation was around having superlative specifications, so no compromise in comparison to the competition. Although, there will be questions raised on the selection of chipset partner. Industry watchers like reviewers, bloggers, and tech publications will talk about it and recommend it should have gone with an established name like MediaTek or Qualcomm with its very first smartphone as HMD before the consumers.
But the message was loud and clear that we haven’t compromised on any specifications so when you are going to compare these HMD smartphones with others you won’t find them lacking.
The other important and rather primary selling proposition that HMD would like to go ahead with is that it understands the Human-Mobile interface and experience very well, probably the best, and wants to bring in meaningful innovations, though incremental to increase the ease of using a smartphone. The launch event had a lot of emphasis on how user can capture selfies with gestures making it very easy. In fact, there were demo presentations shown highlighting the same.
While this might be an incremental improvement and again appeal limited users, the shift in the strategy is that these are segment relevant additions and enhancements. So, if Crest is attempting to make it easy for content creators using entry to mid-tier smartphones to create content, it has a case. Also, since the focus is primarily on selfie camera, it means HMD is looking at solo content creators who use smartphones to create reels and short format videos without having a proper equipment and setup. That’s huge base by the way!
On how the device performs, it’s too early as I am yet to get a hands-on experience. So far it looks a good start and consumers hearing HMD for the first time in markets will get to see some new features of interest that could make their experience and interface with the smartphones easy.
Welcome HMD!
