Apple iPhone 3G strikes wrong chord in India, fails to take off

However, analysts have an explanation. According to them, Apple itself did not expect iPhone to do very well in India despite 10 million phones being sold every month of which 500,000 are of the smartphone range like iPhone. Apple, they said, had expected to sell about 50,000 iPhones in India for the current fiscal year and had its own internal goals of moving 100,000 units by December 2009.

The lukewarm response, analysts said, was not just its high price but actually due to the fact that neither Apple nor its carrier partners carried out any aggressive marketing campaign in India to reach out to the people.

According to the analysts, touchscreen smartphones of other brands, including Nokia N96, Samsung Omnia and BlackBerry Bold cost more than the iPhone, but, looks aside, these phones offer more and better features, making them a huge draw among Indians.

"Though these phones are costlier, yet, they have far better and more features than the iPhone. On the other hand, while some of the iPhone features do not appeal to Indian customers, others, like 3G capabilities, is rendered useless as India does not yet have 3G networks," Bhargava said.

"The biggest mistake is that neither Apple nor its partners could position iPhone as a lifestyle product. The phone, which costs as much as a monthly take-home salary of an Indian IT engineer, failed to take off because not only its price was way too high (vis-a-vis the features it was offering), but also it find to capture the niche market in India," he said.

Agrees Priyanshu Dutta, tech analyst at Swarna Investment Fund.