Though Vodafone is yet to announce any official date for their iPhone launch in India, Airtel has set 22nd August as the D day! Apple iPhone 3G would finally land in India. But still no official word on pricing yet!
In my opinion, it wasn’t the smartest of moves to skip the iPhone 1st Gen in India, as GPS and 3G both are not a trend in India. So ideally it would have made sense for Apple to promote the iPhone 1st Gen (which got a terrific response in the Grey markets).
iPhone’s would go on sale via Airtel’s Relationship Centers (Mobile galleries as we know them). This won’t be a remarkably smooth process, as we already know that visiting any of these relationship centers calls for a big waste of our precious office hours. Visiting these centers is as worthless as finding them…
It is also rumored that the iPhone App Store would also come to India, though there is no word yet on pricing / plans. We are hoping that it does launch below 20000 as we reported back in July!
Update: Complete details and coverage of iPhone in India here