Pre-Register your iPhone in India

For all of you who have been waiting for an official iPhone launch in India, there is a good news and a bad news. The good news is that Airtel and Vodafone has officially announced that they would be bringing in the iPhone here and have started to take pre registration requests too. You can pre-register here for Airtel and here for Vodafone.

Now, the bad news is, that there isnt any information about the launch date yet. Officals are still keeping mum about the date it would be made avilable. On contrary to my earlier beleif that we would get an unlocked iPhone, it looks like iPhone would actually come locked with the service providers and would make use of the services provided by the respective companies including the 3G services too. And this might actually be a reason for the delay in India, as we do not have 3G spectrum available to be used yet. The talks with TRAI are still on and if all goes well, the 3G services might start in a few selected circles by early next year. Now, this might translate to getting the launch date shifted to next year.

Another issue with the service provider locked iPhones might be the price. We all have been infomred by Apple that an 8Gb iPhone would cost only $499, what we dont know yet is the price of the package from the local service providers on which we would get the deal (iPhone + Service Plan). Logic says that Apple might have reduced the prices as they might make profit throught a revenue sharing system from these service providers in turn. So, iPhone might reach your hands with a similar price tag as the earlier version was or even more.

But all these are speculations at the moment.. and only time would tell which way the tide turns.. lets keep our fingers crossed while we wait for the launch.