Panasonic Eluga Ray Max, Eluga Ray X Launched With Arbo Virtual Assistant in India

Panasonic on Monday at an event in New Delhi launched two new Eluga smartphones in India - the Eluga Ray Max and Eluga Ray X - the first to feature the company's new Arbo virtual assistant that's claimed to be intelligent and evolve with the user's usage patterns.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray Max will be made available in two inbuilt storage variants - 32GB storage at Rs. 11,499 and 64GB storage at Rs. 12,499. The smartphone is exclusive to Flipkart, and will come in Gold, Metallic Silver, and Rose Gold colour variants. The Panasonic Eluga Ray X on the other hand is priced at Rs. 8,999, and will also be exclusive to Flipkart. It will be available in Gold, Rose Gold, and Space Grey colour variants.

Notably, both the Eluga Ray Max and Eluga Ray X will get the Arbo virtual assistant one to two weeks after it releases - and is expected in April. Both smartphones will become available to buy via Flipkart in the coming weeks, and ship with a bundled screen guard.

According to Panasonic, its Arbo virtual assistant uses machine learning to provide intelligent usage suggestions to users. The name is derived from Esperanto, and means a framework used to support climbing plants. It learns the user's behaviour, alongside time and location, to provide profile-based suggestions like prompting Settings changes and highlighting commonly used apps. It also prompts Bluetooth pairing if users have previously paired their smartphones with a nearby device.

Panasonic says these are early days for Arbo, and several new features can be expected to be included in 'Phase 2' - including making changes to third-party apps once permissions are granted. All that Arbo learns will be taken forward into future Panasonic smartphones that the user buys.

Let's get to the Panasonic Eluga Ray Max. The dual-SIM (Micro+Nano) smartphone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow and sports a 5.2-inch full-HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by a 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 SoC coupled with 4GB of RAM.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray Max sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with dual-LED flash, apart from an 8-megapixel front-facing camera with a wide-angle lens and front flash. It sports a fingerprint scanner that's Android for Work certified on the home button.

As we mentioned, the Eluga Ray Max bears 32GB/ 64GB of inbuilt storage - and this is expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). Connectivity options include 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.2, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio with RDS, and Micro-USB with OTG support. It runs on 3000mAh battery with support for Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging tech. Sensors on board include an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, barometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, proximity sensor, and temperature sensor. It weighs 165 grams and measures 148x73x9.5mm.

At its event, the company also unveiled the Panasonic Eluga Ray X. The dual-SIM (Micro+Nano) smartphone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow and sports a 5.5-inch HD (720x1280 pixels) IPS display. It is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek 430 SoC coupled with 3GB of RAM. It bears a fingerprint scanner on the home button in front.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray X sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with dual-LED flash, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. Connectivity options include 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.2, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio with RDS, and Micro-USB with OTG support. It bears 32GB of inbuilt memory that's expandable via microSD card (up to 64GB). It runs on a 4000mAh battery, weighs 193 grams, and measures 153.4x77x10.5mm. Sensors on board include an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, barometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, proximity sensor, and temperature sensor