Hike-Airtel partnership to facilitate easy use of smartphones

Hike, a homegrown messaging app, announced a strategic partnership with Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”) to embed ‘Total, built by hike’ on mobile devices under the latter’s ‘Mera Pehla Smartphone’ initiative.

Starting March 2018, select smartphones under the ‘Mera Pehla Smartphone’ will be shipped with Total as a pre-installed feature. With the added benefit of ‘Total’ on all Mera Pehla Smartphone, users can access essential services such as Messaging, News, Recharge and more even without an active data connection and easily get online with access to data packs for as low as Re. 1.

‘Total, built by hike’, a refined version of Android, has four key elements- single login for all of Total services, light services of less than 100 kb to 1 MB, offline version and sachet data packs.

“With ‘Total’ on ‘Mera Pehla Smartphones’, first-time users will find it easy understand and navigate a smartphone. Using data is also simplified and ‘Total’ users can get online with special data packs starting as low as Re 1/-. This is really powerful. We are very clear that to get a billion people online, we need to make the whole process of coming online a lot simpler, less intimidating as well as cost-effective and this partnership …read more