TECNO to open door for young Ghanaian app developers

Marketing and Communications Manager at Tecno Ghana, Jocelene Buckman

Tecno Ghana says it would soon start a project to provide the opportunity for young Ghanaian app developers to design applications specially for Tecno branded smartphones.

The company said it is going viral with affordable but high quality smartphones to enable all Ghanaians own smartphones that march the quality of the top brands on the market. And the plus would be apps that are developed by young Ghanaians.

Head of Marketing and Communications at Tecno Ghana, Jocelene Buckman told Adom Business “we are looking at young Ghanaian app developers coming up with apps that are relevant locally and globally."

She said the project would be in the form of a challenge, where the best apps would emerge as winning apps, and the young developers behind them would then be given the opportunity to fine tune them for Tecno for a fee.

“This is part of our dream to have some local content in Tecno handsets and also give young Ghanaian ICT talents the opportunity to live and grow their dreams and also earn a decent living while doing so,” she said.

The company is also on course to start its assembling plant within the Tema Free Zones enclave soon.

Buckman hinted that company officials have had meetings with the relevant authorities and sooner than later they would start the construction of a plant that would, at full capacity, assemble up to one million handsets for the West African market.

Meanwhile, the company has only recently launched its new and second smartphone, the 3.75G Android dual-sim Tecno N7, which came after the groundbreaking Tecno N3.

Jocelene Buckman said Tecno N3 is currently selling between 7,000 and 8,000 handsets every month, and the new Tecno N7 sold over 200 in just the first week of its release three months ago, prior to the recent official launch.

She is confident the new handset, which is its flagship product, would do well on the Ghanaian market because it comes with the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and a 1GHz dual core processor, running on a 5-inch touch screen, comparable with the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

The inbuilt memory is 4GB and the operating memory is 512MB, but the company gives an 8GB memory card for free with every purchase, and the memory is expandable to 32GB.

It also comes with a free Tecno branded pouch, and MTN SIM card plus 500MB data for free. The Tecno N7 has a 5 megapixel rear camera and 0.3 megapixel front camera.

Jocelene Buckman said users can download up to 800,000 applications on the phone, and the 3.75G feature gives users great experience in terms of data speeds.

“One of the applications worthy of mention is the Flash Share, a unique transfer software that allows one to share files of any format and size at an amazingly fast speed and does not require internet connectivity, WIFI or SIM card,” she said.

She said Tecno's aim is to empower the young Africans with a more superior smartphone with high-end performance and a better user experience, but affordable too.

In that direction, the company hinted it would, by June this year, release a new Tecno F7 phablet that would march the quality of any smartphone on the market and it would come with a 6.1 touch screen, plus 13 mega pixels rear camera.

“We have already shown samples of the new phone to our partners and they are over excited about it just as we are. The unique thing about our phone is that it has the same quality as the big brands but it is dual SIM and it is also affordable,” Jocelene Buckman said.

She also hinted that the company would follow up soon with its branded tablet and several other smartphones would follow in the course of the year.

General Manager, Operations at Tecno Ghana, Derek Nkrumah said the new Tecno handsets, come with 13 months warranty, adding that it case of a fault, the company would fix the handset and return to the owner within just 24 hours.

Tecno Mobile was the first company in the world to start producing dual SIM phones. They have since driven everybody, including the big boys like Nokia and Samsung to start producing dual SIM phones, while Tecno itself has moved on to tri-SIM and quadruple-SIM feature phones.

Tecno phones is number three on the handsets market and revenue share charts in Ghana, with a little over 8.5% market share and about 4% revenue share. It is behind Samsung and Nokia, which are first and second respectively.