iPhone Now Available in India On Airtel and Vodafone

Recently Vodafone confirmed rumors that they were going to sell Apple iPhone in India, now Bharti Airtel, a top Indian telecom player has revealed plans to sell iPhone on their network in India.

Apple iPhone in India on Airtel

Bharti Airtel released a press release that they “had signed a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to India, later this year”. That surely heats up the race to sell Apple iPhones in India, since Airtel is India’s leading integrated telecom services provider with over 60 million customers!

Last year Apple iPhone premiered at Apple Retail Stores in US and instantly topped the most wanted gadgets lists worldwide. Now Indians can become proud owners of Apple iPhone thanks to Airtel and Vodafone.

You can buy an unlocked iPhone in India from the gray market for Rs.25000 ($600 approx), but soon you can buy iphones legally and flaunt it to your friends. Apple crashed the iphone prices by $200 last year and recently Apple doubled the memory, so a 8GB iphone is now available for $399 at Apple stores. Lets await the pricing in India with the call service pack.

Tweaking iPhone with the MagicPad

THE iPhone has some of the most advanced features a phone can ever have. And with the Apple App Store, we will soon have more than 500 new software specifically for the iPhone. Yet, it does not have a simple copy-paste feature.

It is like having a PhD-holding mathematics professor who cannot solve simple and compound interest problems. Enter MagicPad, a new application that is awaiting to be listed on the App Store after getting the necessary approvals from Apple’s engineers.

MagicPad allows for rich text editing ( so you can change the font, its size, or even colour) and just like any other iPhone app, you can drag your fingers over text to select it.

The only problem? It cannot copy- paste between applications. For instance, try copying text from a web page and paste it in your email software, and you will get zilch. That’s a downer, if there was any.

So, can we have the humble copy- paste?

No bets on iPhone for now

IT is just as well that Apple’s 3G iPhone will release in India only in September (or later) though it released in 22 other countries on July 11. By then, Indian consumers — smart and demanding as we are about mobile products and services — would have gotten reports whether the wait is worth it or not.
However, before we even evaluate that, a few gripes. First up, what’s the big deal about the iPhone’s 3G variant in India, since no Indian service provider has a3G network in any case (the government is just about waking up to 3G and talking of auctioning licences)?
At present, the fastest wireless network we have is Edge, on which most smartphones —including the BlackBerry —work. Second, GPS navigation. Online mapping in India is still at a primitive stage, compared to mapping networks in the US or Europe, or even Australia. I am willing to lay a wager on this, but at most times you will not get even the names on the map to synchronise with the names that someone told you about. The problem with mapping in India is not the technology, but the nomenclature of roads, something that keeps changing with changing governments and revolving ideologies.
But what my friends from the US told me next bamboozled me more than a Class 4 Science question from Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain? might flummox a bank clerk from Kakinada — the Apple iPhone does not have a video recorder. Hell and damnation, how does any high-end phone in India not have a camera that records video?
Just as the physicist Stephen Hawking once said that the inclusion of even one mathematical formula will halve the sales of his groundbreaking book. A Brief History of Time, it is possible that the lack of a video recorder could affect the sales of the iPhone. Most mid-end to high-end phones available in India come with standard video recording software and storage systems, and this is a challenge that Apple will have to face once it’s legally sold here (unlocked iPhones are everywhere, though). And yes, there is no way you can receive live TV, which you can on certain high-end Nokia models.
What I am terribly excited about, though, is Apple’s Apps Store, a collection of 500 (and counting) software applications for the iPhone that can be either downloaded free, or for a charge of up to $10. For instance, the eBay auction machine is free, and so is TypePad, the blogging platform. A few games are also free to download. If both Airtel and Vodafone — the two networks that have promised to bring the iPhone to India — deliver on the Apps Store promise, then we could have a good thing going, primarily because the iPhone could then be a serious contender for the much-talked about convergent device.
My biggest concern is pricing. There are just too many price bands (right from Rs 10,000 to Rs 27,000) being thrown around buzz town, and that is not a good sign. Both Airtel and Vodafone must come clean on the phone’s pricing or face a clientele that is not sure what value to put on a premium product such as the iPhone. So while we wait, we wait with a certain amount of scepticism.

New iPhone provokes frenzy in Hong Kong and London

APPLE’S new iPhone made its hotly awaited debut on Friday, with buyers storming stores in Asia and queues forming in European cities. Sales of the device, which combines a music and video player, cell phone and Web browser, kicked off in New Zealand, where a22- year- old student became its first owner. “I’m going to put this on charge, have a play around with it and have anice long sleep,” said Jonny Gladwell, who queued in freezing temperatures for about 60 hours to be the first person to buy the iPhone at a minute past midnight on Friday. Guards in bullet- proof vests and helmets brandished shotguns and guarded over 500 devices on sale in Hong Kong. Softbank Corp, which sells the iPhone in Japan, said over 1,500 people lined up outside its flagship Tokyo store. Policemen yelled at passers- by to make room. In London, an orderly queue in front of the flagship store of O2, a unit of Telefonica, extended around the corner. “We ordered lots. We’ve seen the demand the first time, but we’re blown away by it. I think it is unprecedented,” said Steve Alder, O2 UK’s iPhone director. “We’ve got stocks coming in every week Iam confident that by the end of the summer, everyone who wants one will have one.” “The iPhone phenomenon is going to stimulate the adoption of smart phones. It will change the landscape, the way the iPod did for the MP3 player industry,” said Charles Guo, analyst at JPMorgan. Analysts expect the new iPhone to draw as many as 10.5 million buyers worldwide this year.

How to buy an Apple iPhone in India ?

How to buy an Apple iPhone in India ? What is the price of iPhone in India? Will an unlocked iPhone you bought in US or UK work here?

Vodafone and Airtel will launch iPhone 3G model but does India have 3G? Read this quick iPhone FAQ Guide before you purchase an iPhone from Indian mobile phone dealers.
1. Is the Apple iPhone available in India – Yes but not through the official channel yet.
2. If iPhone is available where can I buy iPhone in India – The Apple phone is not available here officially but you can order it on eBay or buy it from some shops in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderbad, Mumbai, Chennai, etc.
Alternatively, some online underground sites are also selling unlocked iPhone in India but these unofficial iPhone suppliers in India do not share their contact address so be careful in case you run into shipping problems.
3. Will Indian iPhone work with the GSM SIM card of Airtel, Idea, BSNL or Vodafone? If you buy an unlocked iPhone, it will work with GSM networks here but but you cannot use the Visual Voicemail feature of iPhone. Also, iPhone is GSM based so it may not work with Tata Indicom or Reliance CDMA network.
4. Can I buy an unlocked iPhone in US and use it in India - Yes, the iPhone bought in US (or UK or Canada) works in India - you can just buy a local SIM card in India and replace the AT&T SIM. Make sure you read the Apple policies as this may break the warranty.
5. I bought an iPhone in US and am traveling to India on a business trip. How can I save on iPhone international roaming charges while making phone calls in India - Do not use the AT&T call service, instead make phone call over VoIP using the Wi-Fi option of iPhone. You can use Jajah or even Skype to make cheap international calls over the Internet.
6. Is Apple not selling unlocked iPhone - Yes, they have launched an unlocked iPhone in France so not need pay anyone for unlocking the iPhone.
7. What about Apple Store in India – iPhone will be sold via Airtel and Vodafone. The Apple stores that you have in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, etc are for selling Macbooks, iPod, Apple TV and other Apple products but they won’t stock iPhone.
8. What is the price of iPhone in India – The unlocked 4GB iphone is around 20k while the 8GB unlocked iPhone costs around 30k. (includes shipping and taxes) The prices will fall once iPhone 3G arrives here this year and is expected to sell for Rs 10,000 – 12,000.
9. Should I wait for iPhone or invest in BlackBerry or Nokia N95 ? Read this comparison of smartphones - iPhone vs Blackberry, N95. Check these iPhone typing tutorials to see if you can type faster with the touch-screen keyboard. And this online size tool will help you compare the dimensions of iPhone with you existing mobile phone.
10. How do I buy an iPhone officially ? While you can’t buy that yet, pre-register iPhone with either Airtel or Vodafone.
11. What is the launch date of iPhone in India – No official confirmations but Steve Jobs hinted that iPhone will land in September.

iPhone is a quad-band GSM mobile phone so it will working internationally in countries outside the US though you’ll have to ask AT&T to turn on international roaming on the iPhone and that the places you’re going offer GSM coverage.

Vodafone to Launch iPhone

Here’s the good news: Vodafone, one of the two service providers officially licensed to sell the iPhone in India –has announced it will launch the 3G version of the product in India soon and has already started taking bookings. It won’t be long before you see iPhone zombies walking all over New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore with their nifty earphones and getting startled when they get a phone call in the middle of a Coldplay song. Now for the really bad news for people having the misfortune of sitting next to an iPhone owner in the Metro, or a bus or just in the carpool that you thought was a great “Go Green” idea. Among the hundreds of applications that have suddenly emerged to make the iPhone interactive and more user-friendly, the latest one takes the cake. It lets users have video ringtones. So now, we not only have to bear the cacophony of a Himesh Reshammiya song blaring out of the blue, but those sitting next to these carriers of disharmony will also have to see him dance. With 3G phones allowing for good bandwidth, my fear is that downloaded video ringtones would do the same damage to our intelligence as soap operas did to our family lives, just that they will destroy us one by one, unlike the soaps that commit mass murder on intellect.