Bharti Airtel To Bring iPhone 4 To India

India's top telco Bharti Airtel has partnered with Apple to bring the iPhone 4 to the country. Although an exact date has not been given in the press statement issued today, which only reads "in the coming months", according to a Business World article dated July, 2010, this might happen in September or October 2011.

The iPhone 4 is the fourth generation of Apple's iconic iPhone handsets, following after iPhone3GS. The handset, after being announced in June 2010, suffered from production hurdles and issues with its steel band antenna. Yet, the company sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 devices within three days of its launch.

The iPhone 4 has a 3.5 inch multi-touch screen with a 960x640 retina display and has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash. Among its features, is an app called FaceTime for video calling and there is another called AirPrint, which lets you print e-mail messages, photos and documents through wireless networks. It runs on Apple's A4 processor and also claims up to 40 per cent longer talk time.

Although the Indian pricing is not mentioned, the US pricing is $199 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB model.

Bharti Airtel has 20.9 per cent of India's telecom market share in terms of subscribers as of February 2011 (statistics and a table from Indian telecom regulator TRAI are here). Recently, it claimed that it had registered 2 million 3G customers in India.

Airtel also offers broadband, DTH (Airtel Digital), enterprise services and national & international long distance services to carriers. It has operations in 19 countries in Asia and Africa and had 211 million customers across its operations at the end of January, 2011.