Opening thoughts. This week, Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing, wrote a letter on social media, in which he says “India is inevitable”, comparing a consumer electronics manufacturing scale trajectory that he sees as similar to Japan, Korea and China—in terms of producing “it’s own global champions”. OnePlus is spinning off the CMF brand into a standalone Indian company, which he says will be majority Indian-owned, headquartered in India, with its own team and R&D in the country. The manifesto is structurally sound as far as the intent goes, and there needs to be a closer diagnosis of certain points Pei had raised.
I’ll start with the reference of 2015, making the decline of Indian brands in the smartphone market, which has since been dominated by Samsung, Xiaomi and Vivo, before more brands cornered their share of the pie. “The domestic brands were licensing an off-the-shelf design, changing the back cover and adding a logo,” he says, noting that foreign brands arrived with real engineering. On point, because brands including Micromax and Karbonn struggled—only Lava has survived since.
I must come to the point of “Indian-owned” CMF at this juncture. While CMF may be adopting a newer identity, the key point being reemphasised is that Nothing stays as its partner. This means, at least for the time being, the core Nothing OS and broader engineering (be it camera, AI, the works) still come from Nothing. Could this mean a long-term licensing model rather than true technological independence for the Indian entity? One wishes CMF and Nothing the very best in this journey. India needs a strong local flavour in the smartphone market, and any momentum is welcome.
EDITOR’S MARGIN
STARLINK, FINALLY ON EMIRATES
We are at a stage where staying disconnected is becoming increasingly rare during air travel (and when that does happen, it’s often a respite). More and more airlines worldwide seem to be joining that elite club (at some point, it’ll stop being elite, and more par for the course) offering really fast Starlink satellite internet connectivity on board. At 32,000 feet or so, if you’re flying a long route. I know Qatar for one, has had it on much of their fleet for a while now (friends who fly that airline regularly couldn’t stop telling me about it). Being an Emirates loyalist, I wouldn’t give up that loyalty and familiarity for anything else. Passage of time bears fruit.
When I flew from Dubai to San Francisco and on the return flights a couple of days apart this September, both on the absolutely loveable technological marvel the Airbus A380s, got lucky with two tail numbers that have Starlink active. Incidentally, the Aviation Performance Kit (which is an electronically steered phased array antenna mounted atop the fuselage) was very visible on one, not on the other. Interesting. Could this be Starlink testing a new terminal we’ve not seen yet, or perhaps a different installation method? Or maybe my eyes simply betrayed me.
The Starlink proposition is simple—a high-speed and low-latency in-flight internet connectivity, which no service provider so far has been able to. And that’s a fact. Unlike most previous generation in-flight internet services which started working once the aircraft was at cruising altitude, Starlink’s services work on-ground too. Basically, the moment you are seated, you can essentially switch to satellite internet instead of mobile data (which in many cases, would be international roaming).
In my Emirates experience, this started working as soon as I boarded at Dubai—true to my aviation geek nature, I’d already spoken with the flight purser by then (having spotted the terminal on the 380)! Starlink’s base for routing traffic for Emirates flights sits in the UAE, and therefore any speed test that you do will route through a server in that geographical location. Including when flying over the Arctic region (regular in-flight connectivity never works here), Starlink coverage was stable, and in fact, most times faster than a majority of home broadband connections here. On both flights, this peaked around 350Mbps download speeds and around 30Mbps upload speeds, with pings hovering around a healthy 30ms (or milliseconds; lesser is better)—this is astonishing at around 32,000 feet.
Chats, web browsing, social media scrolling and video streaming are smooth. So much so, the crew looked a bit more relaxed, as hours went by with passengers engrossed in doomscrolling Instagram Reels. As per Starlink’s agreement with Emirates, the high-speed internet access is available to everyone on-board, irrespective of class of travel, or Emirates loyalty tier—without any paywall. I managed to get in a quick but seamless FaceTime video call from the A380 to show the daughter the on-board lounge in its majestic glory—mind you, low voice and AirPods for audio. Never make a nuisance of yourself.
TECH SPOTLIGHT
STUFFCOOL OMNI PRO AND ULTRAPROLINK JUICE-UP MAG 9
Power banks are becoming cooler by the day. No longer just happy being functional bricks of battery power without any real personality. That’s changing, and you’ll see more of that happen with subsequent launches.
Take for instance Indian tech company Stuffcool’s Omni Pro, which is a 1000mAh capacity, Qi2.2 certified charger and also has a slide-out Apple Watch charger dock. The iPhone will with the MagSafe standard (incidentally, AirPods with wireless charging cases can make use of this too), get up to 15-watt of wireless charging, and that goes up to 25-watt on other compatible phones—and if you wish to quicken that further, the wired Type-C port will deliver up to 35-watt of fast charging for a phone. There is a real-time battery status display on a side spine. The Omni Pro has a very neat built-in kickstand that allows for a propped-up charging scenario for the iPhone and the Apple Watch. Once done, the Watch charging dock can be hidden away. You’ll be parting with ₹4,999 for this capacity and convenience.
Another Indian tech company Ultraprolink has released the new Juice-Up Mag 9 wireless power bank. This has a 5000mAh capacity, also has a built-in kickstand that’s quite minimal in design and will deliver 15-watt of wireless charging for the iPhone and up to 22.5-watt wired output for phones. The chassis is metal, which is rare for power banks in general. There is a display which shows the battery capacity remaining. As you may expect from the wireless charging architecture, the Mag 9 will also be able to charge Apple AirPods with wireless charging cases. This is priced at ₹1,999 and considering phone batteries are on a higher capacity trajectory, one hopes Ultraprolink launches a more mAh version with similar convenience.