Not Another Mobile Phone Blog

I think that the price at which the service providers are selling the iPhone 3G is a big disappointment for majority of Indians. Indians were waiting for this phone, which launched in India in a span of one month from the date it was launched in US. So Indians were happy that they will get their hands on the iPhone 3G along with rest of the world (India is known for getting latest mobile phones to its shores pretty late). The price has acted as somebody putting water on fire. Though the launch events were crowded, actual number of people going for the iPhone was pretty less as compared to the huge lines we saw in front of the Apple stores in the US. This pricing is very much wrong given the huge population of India, just imagine, if they would have priced this somewhere around 20K it would have sold like hot cakes. Anyway, Vodafone has already said that they are lowering down the price by Rs. 2000 and today they announced that they are tying up with credit card companies so that people can buy the iPhone on EMI. These are good measures of increasing the sales of the “pricey” iPhone 3G in India. But then one basic questions stands, “Is the iPhone (service provider locked) worth the 31K price tag? According to me no, I won’t pay that much money for a phone that cannot do basic functions like SMS forwarding, MMS, video recording. Yeah if you buy it, then unlock it and then install applications you can do all these things. But hey, I am paying so much and I am not getting basic functions is cheating. AirTel has not announced any such plans like Vodafone. Also, AirTel said that the prices have been fixed by Apple and not them, which I don’t believe. The only way they can increase the sales is by lowering down the price by 4000 to 5000 bucks. EMI strategy is good but it won't help that much.