Red Chery to provide a cheap substitute for BlackBerry?

Indian software product company, AJ Square Consultancy, is about to roll out Red Chery – a mobile application that can be used for receiving emails from both free email accounts as well as corporate email accounts. The product team is dreaming big and is planning to market it as a cheaper substitute to BlackBerry and other similar service providers.

AJ Square Consultancy is relying on an aggressive pricing strategy and estimates two million Indian subscribers by this fiscal-end.

AJ Square managing director Boaz Augustin told reporters in a press conference:
“With an average revenue per subscriber of Rs.110 per annum, which is about a tenth of what existing players charge, we hope to earn around Rs.22 crores from 20 lakh subscribers by the end of this fiscal. We may even offer this service free at a later stage.”

Red Chery is a mobile email client application that can be used for receiving emails on a mobile handset from any of the free e-mail accounts (like Yahoo, Gmail etc.) and corporate e-mail accounts (like MS exchange and IBM Lotus servers).

Features

As per AJ Square’s managing director Boaz Augustin, Red Chery will have following features. It is:

• Platform independent
• Telecom service provider independent
• Mobile instrument independent
• Supports to read e-mails like text messages (SMS)

For Red Chery, AJ Square is focusing on the Indian corporate sector to begin with, and the European and Singapore market at a later stage.

Few questions that cross my mind are:

• As stated by Augustin, this service can support reading emails like any text message. Does this mean that the handsets can receive emails on SMS channels and no GPRS is required?
• If it is just another email client application for handsets, will it really stand at par with Blackberry, which is more than just an application?

If functionality wise, it stands at par with Blackberry, and it stands by its added features (as listed above), I think it is worth waiting to see how the market responds.

Link: RedChery