India’s first smartphone with ISRO’s NavIC tech is already available for purchase

India's first smartphone with ISRO's NavIC navigation technology is already available for purchase. Realme CEO Madhav Sheth on Thursday confirmed the company's newly launched 'Realme X50 Pro 5G' comes with NavIC support.

Realme X50 Pro is a premium smartphone which is available for a starting price of ₹37,999. The top-end 12GB, 256GB model costs ₹44,999. Realme X50 Pro's key features include Qualcomm's flagship chip Snapdragon 865, 64-megapixel quad-camera setup, and a 6.44-inch Super AMOLED 90Hz dual punch-hole display.

Interestingly enough, Realme didn't announce the feature at the launch event of the X50 Pro earlier this week.

"Yes, our ultimate flagship, #realmeX50Pro features #NavIC & even our upcoming phone will feature it as well. So World's first, World's second, coming in a row, all for India. Plan to talk more on 5th March," he said in a response to a tweet.

At its March 5 event in New Delhi, Realme is going to showcase the Realme 6 and Realme 6 Pro budget and mid-range smartphones. Based on Sheth's tweet, the upcoming smartphone series is also likely to feature the NavIC support. 

The latest announcement comes shortly after Xiaomi Global VP and MD Manu Jain announced the company is going to launch multiple NavIC-enabled smartphones across price points in India later this year. Xiaomi is India's one of the biggest smartphone companies and dominates the budget segment which is more or less makes the most of the Indian phone market.

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"ISRO developed NavIC with the mission of enabling millions with this innovation, and we at Xiaomi work hard to ensure the same each day. We are extremely proud of the sophisticated geo-positioning tech which ISRO has devised, and even more proud to integrate it into several Xiaomi devices. We also thank our partner Qualcomm Technologies for enabling support in their chipsets as we bring it first to the Redmi smartphone this year," Jain said on the Xiaomi-ISRO partnership.

In case you didn't know, NavIC is India's answer to the US' Global Position System (GPS) which runs on millions of phones around the world. Developed by ISRO, NavIC is designed to provide accurate positioning in India and 1,500km around the Indian mainland. The NavIC is said to be accurate up to 5 meters, making it more efficient than GPS whose accuracy ranges between 20 to 30 meters.