Apple’s dominance in India is yet again confirmed by research firm CyberMedia Research (CMR), which noted that it achieved 30% value share during Q3 2025 in India. Samsung got 22% share. Overall, Vivo retained the top spot with 18% share in the quarter, followed by Samsung (15%), Oppo (13%), Xiaomi (13%) and Apple (9%).

Apple also entered the top five smartphone brands in India for the first time. The older generation iPhones (iPhone 16 and 15 series) together accounted for 82% of Apple’s portfolio in Q3 2025. The iPhone 17 series and iPhone 16e, each contributed 8%.

Largely, India’s smartphone market grew 7% year-on-year (YoY) growth on festive demand, accelerated 5G adoption, and a strong premium push for premium phones.

5G smartphones accounted for 89% of total shipments in the quarter, up 16% YoY. Interestingly, 5G phones in ₹6,000 to ₹10,000 price band surged over 1600% YoY.

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Vivo led the 5G smartphone market with 18% market share, followed by Samsung at 16%.

Vivo’s leadership was credited to Y19, Vivo T4X, Vivo Y39 and Vivo T4 Lite models which accounted for 42% of their 5G shipments.

Samsung’s uber-premium segment (above ₹1 lakh) witnessed 151% YoY growth in shipments during Q3 2025, driven by demand for Galaxy S and Galaxy Z series smartphones.

Oppo secured the third position with 13% market share, with shipments increasing by 8% YoY, led by the Oppo K13x, A5 Pro, and A5x models.

OnePlus recorded a 13% YoY decline in Q3 2025, with the new OnePlus 13 series contributing 40% of shipments, while the Nord line up drove growth with a 60% share.

Xiaomi garnered a 13% market share, declining 18% YoY, driven by fewer launches, weak offline presence within the affordable and value-for-money segments.

Motorola registered a 57% YoY growth driven by its strong 5G portfolio, expanded offline presence, and focused play in the value-for-money and premium segments.

Transsion Group recorded a 4% YoY growth in Q3 2025.

Lava emerged as one of the top two fastest-growing brands on a QoQ basis in the overall market. In the sub-₹10,000 segment, Lava recorded an 114% YoY shipment growth.

In Q3 2025, the 2G feature phone segment declined 14% YoY, while 4G feature phones declined by 24% YoY. The 2G feature phone segment was dominated by Itel Mobile (42%), Lava (29%) and HMD (19%).

MediaTek led the India’s smartphone chipset market with 44% market share. Qualcomm led the premium smartphone segment (above ₹25,000) with a 36% share.

India’s Maharashtra state, home to financial hub Mumbai, will be the first to roll out Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service in the world’s most populous country, the chief minister said.

The launch of Starlink, which provides high-speed internet to remote locations using low-orbit satellites, has sparked fierce debate in India over issues ranging from predatory pricing to spectrum allocation.

India, projected to have more than 900 million internet users by year’s end, granted Starlink a licence in June.

Maharashtra was “poised to become the first Indian state to formally collaborate with Starlink”, the state’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on the Musk-owned platform X late Wednesday.

“This collaboration… will ensure the state leads India in satellite-enabled digital infrastructure.”

In March, India’s biggest telecom service providers, Jio Platforms and its rival Bharti Airtel announced deals with SpaceX to offer Starlink internet to their customers.

Starlink’s business operations vice-president Lauren Dreyer said she was “excited” to further India’s digital vision.

“Looking forward to connecting schools, medical facilities and beyond in the most remote and unconnected areas once Starlink receives final approvals”, Dreyer said in a statement.

Major technology firms looking to court users in the world’s fifth-largest economy have made a flurry of announcements about expanding into the country this year.

In October, Google announced it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to build a giant data centre and artificial intelligence base there, the largest AI hub it is investing in outside of the United States.

U.S. companies Anthropic, OpenAI are both planning Indian offices, while Perplexity announced a major partnership in July with Indian telecom giant Airtel.

Chinese smartphone maker Realme on Friday (November 7, 2025) announced the launch date of Realme GT 8 Pro in India. The new premium smartphone will also begin Realme’s partnership with Ricoh Imaging. The Realme GT 8 Pro will debut the exclusive Ricoh GR-powered camera along with two focal lengths of 28mm and 40mm and five Ricoh GR tones.

The new Realme GT 8 Pro will succeed the GT 7 Pro. The company is expected to launch only the Pro variant.

Realme GT 8 Pro will come with a switchable camera bump which can be detached and replaced with round, square, robot-theme. It turns the lens cover into a freely interchangeable component. Users can unscrew the original camera bump, pick their preferred one, and confirm the fit with a precise lock-in click.

Realme GT 8 Pro will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. It is likely to get up to 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. The phone will also be the first to run Realme UI 7.0 based on Android 16 out of the box.

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Realme said that the GT 8 Pro will ship with a 7,000 mAh battery along with a 120W SuperVOOC fast charging. It will also support up to 50W wireless charging

Realme GT 8 Pro is going to use a 2K display with 7,000 nits peak brightness.

Realme GT 8 Pro will feature a paper-like leather back panel, made from recycled plastics and textiles, the company said. The smartphone will be sell in Diary White and Urban Blue colours.

Realme GT 8 Pro will sell on Flipkart and Realme. It will be launched on November 20 in India.

The White House has informed other federal agencies that it will not permit Nvidia to sell its latest scaled-down AI chips to China, The Information reported on Thursday, citing three people familiar with the matter.

Nvidia has provided samples of the chip to several of its Chinese customers, according to the report.

The chip, known as the B30A, can be utilised to train large language models when efficiently arranged in large clusters, a capability many Chinese companies require, the report added.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that the company has “zero share in China’s highly competitive market for datacenter compute, and do not include it in our guidance.”

White House did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for a comment.

Nvidia is working on modifying the B30A’s design in hopes that the U.S. administration will reconsider its stance, the Information report said, citing two company employees.

The California-based company, however, has also been facing regulatory headwinds in China.

Beijing has recently issued guidance requiring all new data centre projects that receive any state funding to use only domestically developed chips, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Data centres that are less than 30% complete will have to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, the sources added.

The guidance effectively shuts out Nvidia and its AI chips from a lucrative market segment, including advanced models under U.S. export controls that are nevertheless available in China via grey market channels.

Microsoft is forming a new team that wants to build artificial intelligence that is vastly more capable than humans in certain domains, starting with medical diagnostics, the executive leading the effort told Reuters.

Called the MAI Superintelligence Team, the project follows similar efforts by Meta Platforms, Safe Superintelligence Inc and others that have begun targeting technical leaps while garnering skepticism for their ability to deliver, absent new breakthroughs.

Microsoft plans to invest “a lot of money” on the project as well, said Mustafa Suleyman, the AI chief in charge. Meta this year offered $100 million signing bonuses to recruit famous AI talent. Suleyman declined to say if such offers or poaching attempts were on the table. However, he said Microsoft AI would continue to recruit from other top labs while staffing its new team with existing researchers and Karen Simonyan as chief scientist.

Microsoft’s effort comes with a twist. According to Suleyman, the company is not chasing “infinitely capable generalist” AI like some peers. The reason, he said, is he doubts that autonomous, self-improving machines could be controlled, despite research into how humanity might keep AI in check.

He said Microsoft has a vision for “humanist superintelligence,” or technology that could solve defined problems with a real-world benefit.

“Humanism requires us to always ask the question: does this technology serve human interests?” said Suleyman.

AI theorists and developers have long debated whether the technology may lead to imminent danger or poses no harm relative to problems such as machine-learned bias and trustworthiness.

Suleyman said he aims to focus the Microsoft team on specialist models that achieve what he called superhuman performance while posing “virtually no existential risk whatsoever.”

He gave as examples AI that solves battery storage or develops molecules, in a nod to AlphaFold, DeepMind’s AI models that can predict protein structures. Suleyman was a DeepMind co-founder. Suleyman said that for diagnosis, a domain long of interest to the AI field and one that Microsoft has focused on, the company has a “line of sight to medical superintelligence in the next two to three years.”

He said the effort is based on AI that reasons through problems and still would require breakthroughs. But if achieved, he said the AI would “increase our life expectancy and give everybody more healthy years, because we’ll be able to detect preventable diseases much earlier.”