Finnish handset maker HMD just launched its first Indian smartphone, the Vibe 2 5G. It comes pre-loaded with Indus, a chatbot built by Indian AI startup Sarvam.
They announced this partnership back in February, right there in New Delhi during the India AI Summit. Now it’s real.
Indus runs on a massive model, 105 billion parameters, trained locally. That size matters. It allows for something rare here: fluid mid-sentence code-switching. You can hop from Hindi to English without the AI losing its thread. It understands the context.
Sort of.
There are limits, obviously. The app requires internet, so no offline use. Also, there’s no dedicated button or shortcut on the phone to invoke the assistant instantly. You have to hunt it down. Still, Ravi Kunwar, who leads HMD’s APAC region, says accessibility is phase one.
“Right now, by preloading the app we want to be more accessible,” he told TechCrunch.
Get it into hands, then make them stay. That’s the logic.
The Vibe 2 isn’t premium hardware. It’s midrange, affordable, priced at ₹10,990 ($114). It packs a decent 6,000 mAh battery. HMD plans to put Sarvam AI on its entire Vibe smartphone line next. Then feature phones.
And that feature phone angle? It’s likely where the actual leverage lies.
Here is the hard truth about HMD’s footprint: in 2024, they held about 4% of India’s feature phone market. Their smartphone share? Nonexistent. They don’t even rank in the top 15.
Indus itself is still finding its feet. Nearly three months post-launch, Appfigures data shows just under 293,00 downloads in India across all platforms. Compare that to ChatGPT, which has nearly 44 million downloads. The gap is staggering.
But maybe the downloads don’t tell the whole story.
English-language AI tools struggle to penetrate the broader Indian population. Bundling a native-language assistant onto cheap, rugged hardware cuts through the noise. It forces a try. It meets people where they already are.
Will this shift the landscape? Maybe not today.
It is one of the most direct distribution plays possible in a fragmented market. Worth watching.
