BackWill iPhone 5 light up India on Diwali?
The latest smartphone from Apple has a lot of hype to live up to, but India must wait for it for now
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Last night’s iPhone launch led to predictably mixed reviews, with Wired’s headline, “The iPhone 5 is boring, and amazing", summing up the sentiments doing the rounds on Twitter ever since Tim Cook took the stage to talk about the newest smartphone from Apple Inc. For India though, speculation is now on when the new phone will reach here, and for how much, with tipsters predicting Diwali and around ₹ 45,000.
While many details of Wednesday’s event, such as the new iTunes and new iPods, weren’t expected by too many Apple-watchers, this was probably the most leaked iPhone, with details such as the larger screen, resolution and LTE (long-term evolution, a mobile communications standard) all being known well in advance.
Evolutionary improvement
That said, the new device has a number of evolutionary improvements defined by human limitations—the screen couldn’t get wider since the design mandate was that you should be able to use it one handed. The screen couldn’t become sharper because Apple’s claim about retina display is that the human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels beyond this point. The phone can only become so much lighter, because a minimum battery life has to be maintained.
On the other hand, the CPU (central processing unit) and graphics card are both two times faster, while the phone is thinner and lighter. Tech writers might be calling the iPhone 5 “boring", but the same writers also declared the iPhone 4S to be a disappointment, and it went on to be the fastest-selling iPhone, so let’s not write the iPhone 5 off either.
No date announced for India
One area in which the launch disappoints is in the lack of any information for India. We aren’t in the list of countries which are getting the device on 21 September, which includes the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Britain. However, according to Apple, it will be rolling out the new phone in 100 countries, the fastest such exercise for an iPhone so far.
We reached out to Apple’s India office to confirm the details, but Apple did not offer a comment on a possible India launch timeframe. However, there has been speculation for a while now that the devices are to be shipped to India by the end of October, and will become available around Diwali, which is historically when electronic devices, including phones, see a huge spike in sales.
There was no price announced for India either, but looking at trends from other countries, the price for an unlocked iPhone 5 in Singapore works out to around ₹ 43,600, which is in keeping with last year’s iPhone 4S launch, leading many to speculate that an iPhone will be priced at ₹ 43,000-Rs45,000 in India.
Not compatible with India’s networks
The new phone’s biggest feature, outside of the changed dimensions, is that it works on the LTE network, which can be faster than even a wi-fi connection. However, it has also been clarified that this will not be compatible with the 4G networks that are being rolled out in India now.
That, coupled with the fact that many of the other changes are only minor, could actually hamper the adoption of the device in India. As such, India remains a market where low-cost feature phones dominate sales, and as per an October report by the research firm IDC, the iPhone only makes up 2.6% of smartphone sales in India, well behind Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd’s at 21% and Research In Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry at 15%.
Since India does not have the subsidized pricing that you see in other markets, the costs of owning an iPhone become very high here, as noted in the IDC report. A device costing $199 in the US costs $705 in India, not even taking into account the relative purchasing power of people living in both countries.
For this reason, even though there has been a lot of hype around the new iPhone, it’s safe to say that it won’t make Apple a major player in the India market overnight, even if it outperforms the iPhone 4S handily.
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