During my last trip to India I was challenged to make the buying decision for a cell phone for my mother in law. She wanted a Samsung phone, so I felt well equipped to make that decision for her. Boy, was I unprepared for what awaited me at the local store: instead of one or two phones per brand and carrier in the US, the phones are not distributed by the cell carriers – there are multiple of tens of different phones. They are sold as a piece of hardware by any local electronics store. You then buy your SIM card from you preferred network provider and stick it into the phone. When I arrived at the store I was overwhelmed by the 20+ choices of Samsung branded phones alone that were all staring at me. Well, I knew I wanted an Android device (that dropped three phones from the list), preferably 2.3 (another 10 or so gone), a fast A9 processor and a good display. We were down to 5 phones, when distinguishing by technical features became impossible by the information on their respective stickers. Talk about confusing! We had to get the boxes and compare line item by line item to narrow down the choice further. Dumbing me down to a happy American consumer has almost worked, as I was longing for less choices. Can someone just decide on my behalf, tell me what I want and make me feel good about it?

After another ten minutes of studying features on the phone boxes we finally zeroed in on a model that had all the features and a TFT display, not the AMOLED display of the top of the line phone that is also sold in the US. Backing off from the top of the line phone saved us some serious bucks, compromising little. The functionality and versatility of the Android 2.3 device is just plain awesome!

Needless to say that this particular model is not marketed in the US.