Kartikay Mehrotra, in a post for Bloomberg:
Karbonn unveiled the Titanium S5 on March 15, with similar technical specifications to the Canvas HD: Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM)’s Snap Dragon quad-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera and a 5-inch touchscreen for 11,990 rupees. Samsung, the market leader in Indian smartphones, offers the same features on its Galaxy Grand for 21,500 rupees. The iPhone 5 starts at 45,500 rupees in a market where operators do not subsidize handsets.
I've recently had a lot of conversations with a friend, who is from India, about the impact that Karbonn and Micromax have had on the Indian smartphone market. These two manufacturers offer phones that have features comparable to what is available from Samsung and Apple but at half the price. In fact, according to my friend, these phones are cheap enough that oftentimes users will simply purchase a new phone every year since it is the easiest (and sometimes only way) for them to get the latest and greatest operating system version.