10.or

» see 10or.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Huaqin Technology is one of the companies that actually makes the phones other brands sell. In September 2017 it stepped out from behind that arrangement in India with a brand of its own, called 10.or and pronounced Tenor, and the first device was the 10.or E: a 5.5-inch full-HD screen on a Snapdragon 430, 7,999 rupees for the 2GB model and 8,999 for the 3GB one.

The unusual part was the distribution. 10.or phones were sold on Amazon India and were not sold anywhere else, as the first brand in a program Amazon called Crafted for Amazon, where a manufacturer builds to the retailer's read on what its customers want. The phones shipped with Amazon widgets on the home screen and a set of Amazon apps already installed. The 10.or D followed under the same program at 4,999 rupees, which in 2017 was roughly the floor of the Indian smartphone market.

Then the cadence slowed. The D2 arrived in August 2018 to reviews that found it dated on the day it launched, the G2 arrived in July 2019 with 4GB and 6GB versions, and after that nothing new came. The brand stayed on the site as a price-list entry for two more years before @10orIndia posted a closing announcement on 23 October 2021, timed at 08:34 UTC, which is just past two in the afternoon in India.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ built for a catalog ~

A phone brand normally has to solve distribution, and distribution in India means thousands of small shops and a sales force that visits them. 10.or skipped all of it by existing only inside one retailer, which is fast and cheap. It also leaves a brand with no legs of its own: no shop window, and no second channel to fall back on once the listing stops being promoted.

Xiaomi had already proven online-first could work in India, but Xiaomi owned its own storefront and then went and built physical stores anyway. 10.or never had a storefront to own. Amazon did not open a Turkish site until September 2018, and no phones of this kind were ever on it, so from Ankara the brand's whole four-year run reads as a blank page with an archive link under it.

~ five phones ~

Five phones in four years: the E first, then the D and the G, then a D2 in August 2018 and a G2 the following July. Single letters, one per price band, with no flagship pretension anywhere in the line. The E got an Android 8.1 Oreo update with a security patch in September 2018, which for a 7,999-rupee phone from a brand nobody had heard of a year earlier was more than the category usually delivered.

~ the closing tweet ~

There was no press release that anyone archived. The citation for the brand's death on its own Wikipedia article is a tweet, and the only reason the date can be stated to the minute is that Twitter's post IDs carry their own timestamp: 1451829248163868675 decodes to 08:34:01 UTC on 23 October 2021.

The same article's infobox dates the company to 2005, which is Huaqin's founding year rather than the brand's, and lists a head office in Sonipat. Both are artifacts of a brand that was a contract between a factory and a shop. India got four years of cheap, adequate phones out of that contract, and when one side stopped renewing it there was nothing else holding the name up.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »