Its been almost 15 days since the Iphone was launched in India. Reports are coming that the sales are very poor. They are much much lower than the expectations of the telcos (Airtel & Vidafone). 

I fully agree that the pricing was decided by Apple and the two telcos did not have any hand in deciding the price. But I also strongly believe that they could have added an incentive for the user to buy the phone. Airtel has atleast offered 500MB of free surfing (can you use 500MB on the crappy GPRS - they do not offer EDGE at present) and they could have also offered a monthly credit to the user. For example they could have givena Rs 500.00 rebate to postpaid users if their monthly bills crossed Rs 1000.00. The same could have been done for prepaid users by offering additional talk time on recharge.

This would have kept the user happy. He/She  would have received back Rs 12000.00 over 2 years and the telco would have retained the customer for 2 years. It would have been a win-win for both customer and telco.

Hope that the telcos take some lessons from the poor response.

Bye