MUMBAI: Meridian Mobile, which is part of the UK based Meridian Group, has launched its flagship brand for GSM phones, "Fly" in India.

The marketing spend in the first year is likely to be $2 million as stated by the company. Malaika Arora has been signed-on as the brand ambassador for the product. She will be part of both, the print as well as the electronic campaign. The campaign aims to reflect the trendy and glamorous styling of the product.

There are many models like Fly SL 500M, Fly SL 300M and Fly MP 330, to name a few, that will be introduced in the tech savvy Indian market. Fly SL 500M has a 1.3 Mega-Pixel camera with expandable memory, video ring tones with MPEG 4 and IRDA, Bluetooth and other features such as video recorder and player, MP3 player and 64 tone polyphonic and MP3 tones.

Whereas, Fly SL 300M has features like MP3 player, video player and recorder, 64 tone polyphonic and MP3 ring tones and expandable memory. Whereas,

Meridian Mobile adds that Fly MP 330 is the only phone in the market that can enhance equivalent volume of 40 watts. Besides having a video recorder and a player, 64 polyphonic and MP3 tones, it has features like 1.3 Mega-Pixel camera with woofer and speaker console, which is a new feature and is yet to be launched even in the West.

Fly 2040 comes laden with features like 1.3 Mega-Pixel camera with Flash, Bluetooth enabled (voice, data and music), MP 3 player, continuous video recording and playback, 262K TFT display, video ringtones, 60 MB Internal Memory ( Nand Flash ), Micro SD Card Slot and IrDA connectivity.

Meridian Mobile CEO India operations Rajiv Khanna says, “It is important to have fully loaded phones as the replacement market gets stronger. This is likely to result in huge demand for feature rich and stylish phones. Meridian will offer the critical buyer with smart value choices.”

“Our marketing strategy is to focus on store branding and forging alliances with retailers. In the 1st phase our focus is on placement. We hope to reach 5000 premium counters by the end of the quarter, which will together account for 70 per cent of the over-all retail sales.”