Airtel aims to launch Apple iPhone 4 in India by October

Airtel aims to launch Apple iPhone 4 in India by October

Airtel has finally stated that they are working hard to ensure that they could launch the Apple iPhone 4 smartphone in the Indian market by September or October period.

The company dominated the 3G spectrum auctions and have won the rights to offer 3G services in several circles in the country.

Apple iPhone 4 could become a potent weapon in their arsenal to coincide with the launch of 3G in India.

The company added that the Indian government’s restrictions on hardware imports from China is now easing and they are getting the equipments they had ordered for the network roll-out.

Airtel assured: “A very large amount of the network is 3G ready”.

The company has already launched two 3G capable USB modems that can be used with laptops and desktops to connect to their upcoming 3G network.

There are a couple of questions though.

Airtel has not talked about the possible pricing of the Apple iPhone 4 in the Indian market. All the previous generation iPhones have been priced very high in India and that has resulted in few devices getting sold through the official channels. There are no official figures out but it is a well known fact that most customers get their iPhones through unofficial routes.

Another question is the availability of the iPhone 4 units for sale in India. Apple is only scheduled to widely launched the device in the global market later this year. More markets would be added by the end of August. It is not clear if Apple would be able to provide Airtel (and Vodafone) with enough units for its launch.

But then, the low demand here in India is likely to make it easy for Apple to meet the demand from India. Even 10,000 units should be enough for a couple of weeks if not months. That should not be a big problem for the US based tech giant.

The biggest question however is the pricing of 3G plans in India. Looking at the obscene price of the spectrum that both Vodafone and Airtel have paid to the Indian government, it is unlikely to be cheap. You can already forget about unlimited plans… we would be pleasantly shocked if they can deliver affordable limited data transfer packages in the market!

Airtel sells the Apple iPhone 3G 8GB edition for around Rs. 31000 in India. We can only imagine the costing of the iPhone 4 when it is launched here. Some reports claim that the price of the top end model could go above the Rs. 40,000 mark. That would be pretty obscene considering the device is still likely to be locked to the respective mobile service provider.