Chinese smartphone brand Realme sometime back announced its plans to explore other products apart from smartphones and launched a few products like smart TV, smart camera and soundbars etc.
Ever since these products were launched, there was a rumour that the company may soon announce a range of laptops as well to compete with its rival Xiaomi. There was, however, no official confirmation about whether the company had any such plans. But Madhav Sheth, Realme’s CEO for India and Europe, later revealed that the company had plans to launch 100 products in the AIoT segment including smart bulbs, improved earbuds, smart speakers and even laptops.
Now a tipster, Mukul Sharma, has revealed that the company may launch its first computing device sometime later this year. His tweet reads, “if things go as planned, the Realme laptops are set for launch sometime during June 2021.”
Realme is anyways known for launching a barrage of products every year hence this revelation doesn’t come as a surprise. In hindsight, this isn’t a great strategy as most of its phones do not get enough time to create a following in the market. But given the fact that most of its smartphones are either rebranded Oppo phones or its phones get rebranded as OnePlus phones (read Realme X2 Pro and OnePlus 7) with minor changes. Hence this strategy seems to be working for Realme, at least for now.
We’ve seen brands like LeEco that wanted to expand into everything and way too soon, vanished into thin air. Although unlike LeEco, Realme has an option to share technology with other companies under the BBK umbrella.
However, unlike smartphones and other ecosystem products, none of the BBK companies like Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus has computing devices in their lineup. Hence, for Realme to make laptops would mean that Realme will have to brand out into a new category that it doesn’t have any experience and it may choose to go with the ODM route.
This is similar to what Nokia is doing along with Flipkart. The company has recently debuted its first laptop – Nokia Purebook in India. And that said, using ODM might not be alien territory for Realme. It is said that the company uses an ODM to manufacture its smart TV back home in China.
As of now, we have fairly limited information at hand and we’re hoping that the company or its executives may reveal some information around the upcoming laptops during the Realme X7 series launch in India.
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