iPad’s finally washed up on Indian shores. It may be the massive time difference between New Delhi, and California that can account for this really late ‘official’ entry into the Indian tablet market or just the plain, simple fact that Apple doesn’t really care for its Indian market; to begin with.
If you were to compare the sales it generates within the US itself, you’d assume that it doesn’t need to focus on any other region anyway; and top it off with Asia’s manic love for everything android, you get Indians as me, who really do prefer the iOS over OS’s named after sweet snacks with some minor troubles. When the iPad launched last summer in the UK and I was told by each and every family member to get costs and other details from London, I thought of it as a little bit of an overreaction. Surely, the iPad would launch in India within a couple of months? Right?
Not really.
It launched now. The ‘official’ iPad- 1 is here, launched around 30-45 days before the speculated iPad-2 launch.
Sure, the iPhone 2G took 14 months to officially come to India but we are a hopeful bunch. And the iPhone 3GS for that matter, was supposed to ‘officially’ come to India on the 9th of August. It didn’t. And all we saw was this, on the internet:
That, is just really bad attitude towards the world’s second largest cellphone market.
But back to the tablet talk.
The iPad in all it’s glory is a beautiful device, and the best tablet there is in the market. And I don’t know if Apple as a massive company understands this or not but the Indian market understands the need for the “new & cool” gadgets to come in as soon as they can, and consequently gets their (read- our) hands on their (read- our) choice of it, irrespective of whether there has been an ‘official’ launch or not. That being said, let’s understand some nuances of the above mentioned situation.
The Apple iPad launched officially in India on Jan 27th, ’11 and will be available for international shipping in June/ July. So Apple gives us a product officially after 15 months?
MTNL and BSNL have been 3G sim providers for quite some time now along with wifi being commonly available as well. So Apple has no excuse for this late launch other than negligence/ lethargy/ stupidity. This move, in a nutshell, has absolutely no future. No one cares about ‘official’ products from Apple anyway.
Also, Rs. 1 charged for every ‘free’ application from the iTunes India store for your iPad/iPhone/ Macbook. What is that?
