Beetel GD 470 – The ultimate guide

The Indian mobile market is slowly but steadily developing into a specialized cellphone market. Once considered a docking yard for foreign-made flop phones, it today has it own range of India–based and India-centric phones. Phone companies are nowadays coming up with phones that cater to the masses rather than niche audiences. The Beetel GD 470 seems to be a birth-child of the same effort.

Priced at an affordable Rs. 3300, the Beetel GD 470 is a dual-SIM full touchscreen phone. The handset is equipped with a 2.8-inch touchscreen and 1.3-megapixel camera.

Apart from being a full touchscreen feature phone, this handset offers a multi-format audio/video player that supports .3GP,. AVI, .MP4 video formats along with MIDI, AMR and WAV formats. What that means basically, is that you no longer have to change your files to a prescribed format to transfer them to your mobile phone. To support its music/video capabilities, the handset offers up to 8 GB of storage.

Beetel introduced a new feature with the GD 470 codenamed the ‘Beetel World’. Beetel world, in a nutshell, is a bundle of popular services such as Facebook, Snaptu and Yahoo.

But that’s not all. Since both Airtel and Beetel are homegrown brands, they have engineered the set to suit to requirements of an Indian consumer. It comes with an Indian calendar enlisting all Indian festivals.

The most interesting feature of the GD 470 is that it is not only a dual-SIM phone; in fact it has a dual-personality. The phone also doubles up as an Internet modem implying that if you connect the phone via USB while using network supported Internet, you can use the same Internet connection for your PC.

The mobile being dual-SIM even offers one an option of trying out the Internet connection of an operator different than your normal one. For e.g. If your number is an Airtel no. but you want to try out an Idea one for Internet; you are free to do so.

All in all, the Beetel GD 470 seems an admirable effort by the company to target the Indian budget phone market. 

It’s become a burgeoning trend in India for mobile network operators to venture into the growing cellphone industry. When Vodafone came up with its own range of phones, how could rival Airtel lag behind?

 To match up to the market, Airtel’s parent company, Bharti Enterprises acquired landline giant Beetel telecom to come up with its own range of phones and tablets.

Airtel’s acquisition of Beetel seems to have worked in its favor. Along with its own range of phones, Airtel also recently unveiled the Beetel Magiq tablet, which is, again a budget device centered on Indian consumers.