Amazon wouldn’t necessarily be the first huge online retailer you thought of if you lived in India, because local site Flipkart is doing its best to maintain control of the growing market. To help do this, it has announced the Digiflip Pro, an Amazon Kindle Fire challenger designed to help any of its 3.5 million daily users who buy one spend more money on the site. If that sounds familiar, it’s the same as Amazon’s thinking behind its entire Kindle and Fire device range.
The Digiflip Pro is a 7-inch tablet, which comes with a dual-SIM 3G setup, ensuring it can compete with most popular smartphones available in the country. The screen’s resolution is a modest 1280 x 800 pixels, which matches other basic tablets such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 4 range.
Inside is a quad-core, 1.3GHz processor produced by MediaTek, along with 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage space. A MicroSD card slot can add up to another 32GB. Sadly, the operating system is lagging behind the very latest Android smartphones, and it comes with 4.3 Jelly Bean installed. It looks relatively untouched in the press photos, indicating Flipkart hasn’t followed Amazon and invested in a heavily customized skin. The spec list continues with a 5-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a 3000mAh battery.
What makes the Digiflip Pro interesting is Flipkart’s decision to include a variety of freebies to attract buyers. It comes with more than $100 worth of apps, offers, services and e-books, which must be redeemed using the pre-installed Flipkart apps. The company needs to standout, because Amazon opened up its shop in India last year, and already sells the Fire HD and Fire HD 8.9 tablets through its local store.
It’s on the right track to win over consumers though, and has priced the Digiflip Pro very aggressively, at a mere $165. By comparison, the Kindle Fire HD is priced at the equivalent of $265. The tablet is on sale now.
