iPhone launched in India sans mass hysteria

Apple's iconic 3G iPhone made its debut in India, sans the public frenzy that greeted its worldwide debut last month, as a steep price and mixed reviews kept potential buyers at bay. Vodafone Essar, the Indian unit of the UK-based wireless major and Bharti Airtel, India's leading GSM operator, launched the latest version of Apple's smart phone in the country on August 22. The 8GB 3G iPhone is available in India at Rs31,000 while the 16GB model will cost Rs36,100. The same handsets in the US are cheaper. The 8GB model retails for US$199 and the 16GB model for US$299. So, people in India will think twice before they spend such large amount on the snazzy iPhone. Airtel claims 200,000 customers have registered for the iPhone, Vodafone has reportedly registered half this number.

Offtopic - iPhone sells 1m phones

After 74 days after it was released, the iPhone broke the 1 million sales mark

It took 2 years to sell 1 million iPods

Thousands buy iPhones

Via Reuters

Thousands of U.S. gadget fans made an orderly pilgrimage to stores on Friday to be among the first buyers of Apple's iPhone, a music- and video-playing device expected to reshape the mobile industry.

Crowds outside some of Apple's outlets cheered as their doors opened at 6 p.m. local time, while smaller groups waited outside AT&T stores. AT&T Inc. is the phone's exclusive wireless carrier for the first two years.

"It's the best day of my life. It's Christmas, birthday, New Year's all rolled into one," said Kristian Gundersen, a 23-year-old graphic designer from Norway who flew to New York just to buy an iPhone.

Gundersen was one of the first to walk out of Apple's Fifth Avenue store with a device. Within two hours of opening, several hundred people had completed purchases at the outlet.

The iPhone melds a phone, Web browser and media player, and costs $500 to $600, depending on how much memory it has. Technology gurus praised it as a "breakthrough" device, but question whether users would be unhappy with its lack of a hardware keyboard and pokey Internet link.

The svelte gadget is a gamble by Apple Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Steve Jobs to build upon the company's best-selling iPod music player and expand the market for its software and media services.

"They want to extend the dominance they have in terms of their ability to create really elegant hardware and software integration," said Mark McGuire, analyst with research firm Gartner. "This is the next big business unit for them."

Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would amount to a 1 percent share of the global market. It has not given a sales goal for the launch, but some analysts said it could sell up to 400,000 units in the first few days.

What is less clear is whether sales will hold up once the initial excitement has waned.

Piper Jaffray said this month Apple could sell 45 million units in 2009, putting the iPhone on par in terms of revenue with its two key businesses, the Macintosh computer and iPod.

Many analysts say Apple stock could rise another 30 percent in the coming year if the phone catches on, but some cautioned that the shares are already richly valued.

"Apple shares have already benefited from a powerful hype cycle," Cowen & Co. analyst Arnie Berman wrote in a report.

Shares of Apple rose 1.2 percent to $122.04 and have gained more than 30 percent since Jobs unveiled the phone in January. AT&T shares rose 1.9 percent to $41.50.

SHAKING UP THE INDUSTRY

Friday's launch was seen as a test of wider U.S. demand for advanced phones, which have already caught on in parts of Asia and elsewhere.

It has already whipped technology lovers into the sort of frenzy usually associated with a new video game console.

Judging by its first customers, the iPhone seemed to draw an older generation of gadget geeks rather than young fans who may have been put off by the price, including a required service contract that starts at about $1,400 for two years.

"The phones out there are just garbage. I've gone through several phones, even the expensive ones. This is different," said Albert Livingstone in Chicago. "It's the newest toy. I'm 62 -- I don't have much time left to buy toys."

Some aimed to make a profit on the iPhone by selling it or getting paid to wait.

"I'm definitely a mercenary," said Kyle Laurentine, outside a San Francisco Apple outlet, where the doors had yet to open and about 200 people were waiting. "I am 17 years old and I don't need an iPhone. I have an iPod and a cell phone."

The phones quickly popped up for sale online at inflated prices. On online classifieds site Craigslist, most listings ranged between $750 and $1,500, with one optimist asking for $10,000. One iPhone offered on auction Web site eBay had 23 bids and a price of $1,325.

Apple's online store posted a message reading: "We'll be back soon. We are busy updating the store for you and will be back by 6 p.m. PDT."

Apple is expected to sell the iPhone in Europe later this year in the run up to the holiday season. It has not disclosed the price or carrier, though speculation has mounted it may reach a deal with Britain's Vodafone Group Plc.

Sales in Asia are expected to begin sometime in 2008.

But the iPhone's effect has rippled through the wireless industry before even a single unit has been sold.

Rival Palm Inc. has said the iPhone could hurt demand for its Treo smartphone, at least in the short term.

"It's likely that as people try (the iPhone) out, there may be some stall in our sell-through," Palm Chief Executive Ed Colligan told Reuters on Thursday.

iPhone: Is It Worth $500?

Apple Inc.'s feverishly anticipated iPhone combines the music and video features of an iPod with the communications functions of a smartphone. The question is how many consumers will be willing to pay the hefty price for the combo.

The iPhone has a sleek design and is only 11.6 millimeters thick. A 3.5-inch screen, bigger than on most iPods, extends for almost the entire length of the nearly button-free device. Instead of the iPod's iconic scroll wheel, users will navigate through their song collections, make phone calls and perform other tasks by tapping their fingers on the iPhone's touch-sensitive screen. Users of the iPhone will make calls or type emails on a virtual keyboard that pops up onscreen as needed.

Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., has an exclusive agreement with AT&T Inc.'s Cingular, the nation's largest cellular carrier by subscriber, to sell the iPhone in the U.S. for $499 and $599 -- well above mass-market cellphones -- with a commitment to a two-year wireless plan. Although it has been on a hot streak, Apple doesn't always hit it big when it enters new markets. The company collaborated with Motorola Corp. on a phone called ROKR that plays songs from users' iTunes music collections, but it was seen by many as a disappointment because of limited storage capacity.

Price Cut?

It's unclear if and when the prices for the iPhone might come down, as prices for electronics gear such as flat-screen television sets and video camcorders tend to do. While prices for the iPod have generally stayed in the same range over the years, consumers have been getting more features on new generations of iPods, essentially getting more for their money each time. With cellphones, the historical model has been for prices of such devices to come down quickly, with wireless carriers sometimes taking a loss on the products in order to get consumer subscription revenue.

In defense of the price of the iPhone, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a speech at the start of the Macworld conference in San Francisco that consumers normally have to pay $199 for a comparable iPod nano and $299 for a smartphone, which would lack many of the whiz bang features of the iPhone at roughly the same price.

With Cingular, Apple developed a feature the companies described as a major innovation, calling it "visual voice mail." Instead of having to wade through voice mail messages in the order in which they were left, iPhone users will see a list with the names and phone numbers of people who left them voice messages and tap to listen the messages in whichever order they like.

There are also sophisticated sensors within the product that, for instance, adjust the brightness level of the screen to make it more legible based on ambient lighting conditions. Another sensor automatically shifts the screen-orientation of the iPhone to landscape from portrait mode when a user holds the device between two hands, which will allow users to view movies and television shows in wide-screen mode.

Initially, users will load music, video and other content onto the iPhone from their computers, not wirelessly over the Cingular network. Executives in the music industry say Apple will need to negotiate new licensing agreements with music labels to obtain rights to sell songs wirelessly on the iPhone.