As the text is written on a special digitizer or Personal Digital Assistance (PDA) in which a sensor picks up the pen-tip movements along with the pen-up/pen-down switching, its automatic conversion is performed in the online Handwriting Recognition (HR). There are several works related to the online recognition of Devanagari as well as Tamil scripts. Meanwhile, the online recognition works associated with other Indian languages, specifically Telugu, which is complex in its structure together with style, are very few. Our work emphasizes the development of an online handwritten Telugu character recognition system using dominant points with the combination of SVM and performance analysis of various other features. Three classifiers namely, SVM, K-NN and MLP are used to examine the performance of the feature vectors. The proposed research is verified with HP-Lab data available in the UNIPEN format.