MoFirst Solutions Ltd., a company formed by three IIT graduates (Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi,, has launched a new smartphone called "Firstouch" that lets a user translate all any text on its screen from English to various Indian languages and vice-versa, just by swiping across it. Moreover, the Firstouch phone features a first of its kind 48-key virtual keyboard that has all the Indian alphabets - Now that is something a lot of Indian consumers would love to have. The trio team has developed this keyboard and acquired a patent for it. With an aim to break the language barrier between people (rural folks) and smartphones, they have built a predictive text engine too. In fact, the advantage is two-fold. The market has now been expanded to for telecom operators and device makers.

MoFirst, the company that has been making iPhone apps for a long time now, was the one to develop India's first mobile trading platform for Motilal Oswal Securities in 2012. They also have different products in m-commerce and m-ticketing solutions besides apps for Android and BlackBerry platforms. Priced at Rs. 6,000, the first Firstouch phones will be made available for Gujarati users in Rajkot, starting next month. Next in line are the languages - Hindi and Marathi.

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Akash Dongre, COO, MoFirst Solutions Pvt. and Rakesh Deshmukh, The CEO
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The advanced translation technology built for the Firstouch phones means that if you type 'How are you?' as a SMS, it can be read as 'Tame kem cho?' in Gujarati by the receiver. The company is now looking forward to extending this feature to email and social networking apps within the next one year.

It is interesting to note here that Samsung offers gadgets that support up to 9 Indian languages, whereas Sony's products support up to 15. What are your thoughts on this novel initiative from MoFirst Solutions? Share your thoughts with us in comments.

Source: Economic Times | Image Credit: Bloomberg