It was inevitable. Such was the hype that the reality was always going to be anti-climactic. I don’t see anything hugely different from the original iphone, the main talking point is the 3G radio which is useless in India. The GPS is nice, but it will be a battery killer and I find that the triangulation offered by Google Maps good enough for most purposes (it was able to locate my position in places like Dharmapuri and Kaveriatnam).
There are still quite a few big items that give me reason to pause, the lack of a keyboard, no video recording, no removable battery being the chief irritants. On the positive side, it is a wonderful media device, especially for video. Plus with the opening of the app store, it will become one of the pre-eminent app development platforms, with a number of fantastic applications. We've already seen a preview with the jailbreaked apps and the licensed apps will be even better.
I hear that Apple is going to offer it for the equivalent of 199 dollars around the world. At this price, it is obviously subsidized, I wonder what the price in India is going to be, I don't think the subsidy model is going to work here. I expect it to retail at around 16K for the 8GB and 20K for the 16 GB models. At that price, the likes of Nokia and Sony are going to be hit really hard.
The next few months are going to be really good, there are a lot of really interesting phones coming out, like the Nokia tube, Sony Xperia and the many variations of Google Android. With the iphone unlikely to come to India till later in the year, it will give me enough opportunity to evaluate these before making my choice.
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