iPhone to be launched today at Rs 31,000

Apple’s new iPhone

Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, Aug. 20 The much-talked about iPhone 3G will be launched in the country on Thursday, starting at Rs 31,000.

The device will be launched by both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar. The higher version of the phone manufactured by Apple is likely to cost Rs 36,100.

Meanwhile, rival phone makers are also planning to up their ante on multimedia devices. While Nokia has already announced its plans to launch N96, LG is introducing its RD10000, the latest CDMA mobile handset, in India tomorrow. LG claims that this phone provides features and facilities that are on a par with iPhone in the CDMA space. The cost of the LG phone is approximately Rs 20,000.

Windows-based HTC is also lining up its range of smart phones to take advantage of the hype over iPhone.

“One will see a range of launches in the high-end segment over the coming weeks. So far Indian mobile market talked about low-end phones for the mass market. However, the buzz over iPhone has certainly created an interest among consumers about the high-end devices. Most manufacturers will use this opportunity to showcase their product and compare it with iPhone,” said an industry analyst.

The interest in these high-end multimedia devices is being driven by the fact that there are 50 million mobile subscribers in India who surf the Internet on their handsets.

Idea Cellular is expected to launch the iPhone sometime in September this year, the company Managing Director, Mr Sanjeev Aga, said today.

According to one survey, people with converged devices use only 12 per cent of the total time on making voice calls. Ninety per cent of the time, people are using other functionality of multi-talented devices.

Not surprisingly, new mobile devices and Internet services consume more bandwidth and place greater demands on mobile networks, which still focus heavily on voice traffic.

For example, the first Apple iPhone generated 50 times more Google search traffic than any other mobile device during the 2007 Christmas period. In addition, the iPhone typically consumes more bandwidth than competing devices as services are not compressed (100 MB per month for iPhone compared to 10 MB for BlackBerry).

Network specialists such as Ciena believe that mobile operators should ensure scalability for new data services without sacrificing support for legacy voice services by making the network resilient enough to cope with extreme peaks of bandwidth intensive applications.