The iPhone was finally released in India. I believe it never lives upto its tagline, "twice as fast, half the price". Here’s why. The pricing is very steep & it doesn’t fit the bill in the sensitive Indian market context. A jail broken iPhone is available at 20,000 INR in the grey market sans the support while the iPhone is available through only 2 operators, Airtel and Vodafone, at 31,000 and 36,000 (INR) for the 8GB and 16GB models respectively. Let alone the hundreds who buy it for hype, the status and ‘cool’ness factors, why bother buying a 3G phone when India doesn’t have a 3G network at all! Also, there is no iTunes store for India.

Here go some reasons why iPhone might fail in India:

1. Overpriced in India.
2. No 3G video calls over 3G network.
3. You cannot forward a SMS message, you have to retype it or use an external application to do it.
4. NO autofocus, NO flash in camera.
5. NO camera settings what so ever.
6. NO copy paste function
7. Mediocre camera with only 2MP.
8. Plastic casing (Earlier it was metallic casing)
9. No FM Radio. Indians love FM stations. Don’t they?
10. Bluteooth is only limited to headset use (no file transfer) 
11. No AD2P on the Bluetooth
12. You can’t pair it with stereo bluetooth headset, yes its true iPhone inspite of being a music phone does not support A2DP
13. There is no sync between Notes & the TODO’s
14. There is no inbuilt office document editor.
15  No Voice Dialing!
16  Battery life is bad according to CNET tests. No removable battery. (You cannot change battery. Have to send it to Apple outlet to change it)
17  Cannot send MMS - Can’t receive MMS messages!
18. Cannot use as external storage device
19. Cant share ANY (mp3, images or videos) files via Bluetooth.
20. Can’t use as a wireless modem
21. It lacks proper support for Flash websites.
22. No songs as ring tones!!!
23. It only allows for a maximum of 1 picture to be attached to each e-mail you send!
24. You cannot save documents on it; documents can only be viewed as attachments when they’re sent to your e-mail address
25. Smudgy - It’s not finger print resistant - as iPhone is a touch screen phone so it is bound to get your finger print everytime you touch so it will get dirty very easily.
Edit:
26. You can’t send your contacts as business card or search for contacts. You have to use an external hack to search.
27. Apple doesn’t have a service network in place in India. Just like their other products, which are overpriced and lack proper service support in India, I still wonder what happens if I have a problem midway.

Just don’t fall for the hype. Its slick. But not all that. You can wait for the price to come down or await other models like the Sony Ericsson’s XPeria or HTC Touch with its TouchFLO interface  - which are saturating the iPhone hype.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!