Scared by the success of Motorola Moto E, India's Lava and Micromax launch their own cheap Android KitKat phones

India is the world’s second largest mobile market, and, as you’d imagine, it’s very competitive. Apart from well-known international companies like Samsung, Apple, Sony or HTC, India has its own handset makers, some of which are quite successful there. Two of the local companies, Lava and Micromax, seem to be scared by the success of Motorola's Moto E, which was launched in India almost two weeks ago, and just flies off the (virtual) shelves. It appears that the Moto E is India’s most popular budget-friendly Android smartphone at the moment.



What makes the Moto E a great buy isn’t just its price (6,999 INR / $120), but also the fact that it offers pretty nice features (including a splash-resistant case), while running Android KitKat. Before the Moto E, there was no affordable smartphone to run Android KitKat out of the box in India. So Lava and Micromax introduced two new cheap handsets that address this issue, becoming their first KitKat smartphones.



Lava’s handset is called Iris X1. It will be available starting May 28, costing around $136 (7,999 INR). Its features include a 4.5-inch IPS display with 480 x 854 pixels, 8MP rear camera, 2MP front-facing camera, 1.2GHz quad-core Broadcom BCM23550 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of expandable internal memory.



Micromax’s KitKat smartphone is called Unite 2, and can already be purchased for the same price as the Moto E. The handset offers a 4.7-inch display with 480 x 800 pixels, 5MP rear camera, 2MP front-facing camera, quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582M processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of internal memory, and microSD card support.