Update: There are reports that iPhone sold 4000 units, and it may be a possibility that they sold it in combination of actual delivery and pre-ordering, we do not disagree, but we stand on our report. We have these numbers from a very reliable source.
Update: Cell phone companies never publicly said that iPhone lacks video camera capabilities, MMS, Bluetooth and only has a 2 Megapixel camera. Please contact your iPhone provider about it.
iPhone launched with much fanfare in India, but with no buyers, the top reason being the ill calculated pricing strategy in place. To top it people did not know that the phone did not have a video camera and are already complaining about it to the cell phone companies.
Going with the launches across India, it was not more than a dampener. To put it into perspective, the reception in a New York store would have beaten the reception iPhone got in the whole of the country, and they barely managed to snatch 1000 iPhones.
What Went Wrong?
Several things went wrong, like we told you earlier the pricing strategy was a big let down in a market that would not spend more than INR15000 ($350) for a phone, people who would have bought the phone would have been termed crazy if not Apple Fanboys.
To add to that fact, Apple doesn’t carry the feature many Indians rely to communicate, Multimedia messages are a done thing and iPhone does not have a feature that supports that, add to a fact that iPhone does not have video capabilities and also lacks Bluetooth.
This in lieu with the fact that India does not have a 3G plan in place yet, which would mean that users have to surf on a EDGE/GPRS connection along with having to foot a data plan bill that would be triple of a regular phone users bill, just to access the Internet on a limited bandwidth. If you are in US you could compare this with the first generation iPhones, which had problem with Internet connections.
Would It Be Good?
There is some news that the prices have been cut, though this seems to be a real desperate measure to get more buyers, given the mentality and lack of features, we definitely don’t see a hike in the sales figures in India. Alas the phone that sold in millions in the US, does not convert to a killer phone worldwide, there is Nokia (our favorite) to push Apple’s tails to a level where they can smell it, and right now they surely smell something bad there.
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