Apple is finally launching the iPhone 5 tomorrow in India. A mail from the imagine store specifies that they would launch the iPhone 5 tomorrow. What is already a well known fact is that the iPhone 5 replaces the earlier iPhone 4S with the pricing remaining intact at about 44,500 for the 16GB version, 52,500 for the 32GB and a whopping 59,000+ for the 64GB version.
At the price of the 64GB version Indians could do a lot of better things like paying 6 months of rent for a house, or buying a bike, or even buying an iMac. For the more culinary oriented guys, this money can buy you 300 costa cafe mochas, or about 600 MacD burgers.
While the iPhone 5 definitely has a lot going for its design and functionalities with the iOS6, it still does not justify the price being double of what other smartphones that provide same or similar features. S3, or the HTC 1x for instance.
Where Apple shines as compared to the others is in honoring its device warranty with mostly a replacement for devices like the iPhone or the iPad or with a definitive repair for the iMac. But these goodies too come with a cost of roughly 10%-20% of the product price in terms of a yearly Apple care cost. While this is still justified for the iMac or the Macbook Pro, it most certainly looks to be an overkill for a device such as an iPad or a phone.
With the leading phones by HTC, Samsung and Google at roughly half the cost, Apple’s iPhone 5 pricing seems to bring down the sheen in a highly competitive market. Add to that propreitary accessories, plus inaccessibility to the file system and not much real functionality available and the recipe isn’t even worth what you are paying for. Add to that a sloppy maps and siri functionality for India, and you would be having a dead on arrival product as compared to other phones which are live and fresh at the moment.
Google and Samsung are right on top of the game giving Apple a tough time in terms of pricing. While Apple still would make most of its revenues in America, Europe, and UK alone, there is a fierce couter attack on the Asian side from the Korean giants Samsung and LG. LG’s upcoming nexus 4 will be butter smooth, has had a great review on major websites, plus at half the cost and much better google integration is more than ready to trounce the iPhone hands down.
The latest release of Google’s voice search for Apple devices only goes to prove how important Indian english as an accent is for India specific devices. The accuracy of Google’s software is simply mindblowing and more realistic than the dreamy Siri software which is more based on retrospecting on the questions asked to it. Needless to say the gaffe on the siri and maps precision has led to Apple asking its executives handling these to depart which has also led to its share price erosion to some extent and also brings to the forefront the possible bitter politics that can rear its ugly head sooner or later.
There is also no conclusion on whether the carriers would be launching nano-sims across the country once the device is rolled out. Most likely they will but they remain until this day tightlipped about this possibility even many of us already know too much about the iPhone. The iOS6 itself is losing some of its sheen after the jelly bean 4.2 update as the iOS6 has no great additions than what used to already be there.
So given the upsides and downsides of the iPhone 5 launch, would you go ahead and buy one of these? I would love to hear from you on this! Go ahead pour your comments!
Bangalore Blog 