Daily Archives: June 18, 2008

I recently got a comment asking if he should by an iphone or wait for the 3G iphone to officially launch in India, or buy something else all together.

So here we go.

Iphone 1.0 (old iphone)

Now you can get these iphone for cheap. But you have to rush to get them, because apple has stopped making them long time back. You can also wait till the 3G iphone launches and most of the older iphone user will sell theirs, so you will get it cheaper if you don’t mind using a second hand device.

The iphone 1.0 has all the things you need. So if you have a smaller budget and want to use it with your current Sim get this iphone. The price I have heard now ranges from 16000 Rs to 25000 Rs.

Iphone 2.0 (New 3G one)

You will have to wait a long time. More than six months at least because the 3G service has not yet launched in India so you can’t use this iphone in India because no 3G service is available.

Secondly it will not be cheap even if you get a cheap phone, you will be paying more for the service. So in the end you will end up paying more for this iphone than the unlocked one.

Most of the new features might not work in India.

3G – No service yet

GPS – Indian government is really cautious in providing permission for maps so I am not sure how well this will be implemented. There could be restrictions that will make it useless.

Price – It will be available for that price but you will end up paying big for the service. The cheapest unlimited gprs plan in India costs 450 Rs. So expect at least 1000 Rs rental plan for 3G.

So if you are willing to wait for few months and don’t mind paying huge service prices then this could be a good buy for you.

Other Phones

Iphone has some serious issues. The big one no cut and paste. If you use your mobile for emailing and other web stuff you will really get annoyed with this very quickly.

The camera is only 2 mega pixel and has no video recording. others have 5 mega pixel and slow motion video recording etc.

There are some other things like no access to file system. No multi task capability, No MMS, No over the air syncing etc. Most of these are present in the new iphone but not sure how well they work in India.

Some of the other phones you should look at are.

Nokia N95 – 5 MP camera, GPS, no touch screen
Samsung F700 -  3.0 MP camera, touch-screen and Wi-Fi
LG KU990 Viewty – 5.0 MP camera, touch-screen
LG KE850 Prada – 2 MP camera, touch screen
HTC Touch – 2 MP camera, touch screen

My conclusion is iphone works really well but you have to really put some effort into it. Like putting all your music into itunes and contacts and calendars into outlook etc. Then it works flawlessly, if you don’t have time for that, buy the other phones where you could just throw some stuff into memory card and they will work. And you can find applications online to do anything you want with other phones. Where as iphone has its big limitations.