Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Well we have been getting a lot of questions about the Iphone 3G, so here is a short FAQ for the time being  , but first some general Iphone 3G news, the Iphone is out of stock in the USA and its GPS is pretty bad from various reviews we have read. Updated 20th July 2008.

1. Who is going to launch the Iphone first in India ?

90% its going to be the Vodaphone Iphone 3G that will be launched first in India, it will be followed by the Airtel Iphone 3G , other companies like Idea and Spice will not be launching the Iphone 3G on their networks. The Indian Iphone 3G will most probably be locked to Airtel and/or Vodafone, ofcourse it will be unlockable as hackers worldwide are working to unlock the Iphone.

2. What kind of plan will the Indian Iphone have ?

The Indian Iphone as we said will be locked to Airtel and Vodafone, as Apple is supposedly subsidizing the cost of the Indian Iphone 3G, its very much possible that like in the USA, it will come bundled with a data plan, so cost could be as high as Rs.500 per month data charges apart from rent and call charges. Ofcourse final details will be known later. We’ll will update you as soon as Vodafone and/or Airtel announce their Iphone tariff structure.

3. What will the Airtel and Vodafone Indian Iphone 3G cost ?

Not $199 we are afraid, the Airtel Vodafone Indian Iphone will most probably cost around 14000-15000 Indian rupees (INR) at launch, and with the high demand its expected to be sold out in India a few days after the launch. We ofcourse would recommend waiting a little before buying the Iphone in India so prices come down, never smart to buy a product when its being sold at a premium.

4. Will Apple Applications be available to Indians ?

Yes ofcourse, Apple Apps will be available to Indian customers, infact companies like Indiagames are already planning (i read it) to release games for the Iphone 3G.

5. My relative is in the US, should i get them to buy the Iphone 3G and bring it to India , willl it work on Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Spice Telecom, Aircel etc.?

The Iphone 3G currently cant be unlocked to a non AT&T network. And also Apple has learnt its lesson, its offering in-store activation only. You can only buy the phone with a connection and it has a hefty cancellation fee. So really little use in getting these locked bricks attached to AT&T. Wait for some time, as soon as we get some clarity, we will let you know more. This phone will not work with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea etc. without activation.

6. Is Apple Iphone 3G really the ultimate phone to be launched in India ?

No, its not. 3G services really arent available in India. A lot of other phones also have 3G, but again its of absolutely no use.

Iphone has Wifi, most Windows Mobile phones come with Wifi, it has a 2 MP camera, which is pretty low, it has no video recording (huge setback) , the only feature we think is yet to be properly replicated is the Multi-touch feature. HTC Touch and other Windows mobile phones do provide a good touch interface though.

The Iphone has no expandable memory, no stereo bluetooth connection capability (NO A2DP) , its camera has no flash, it has no picture messaging and no cut and paste text support.

7. So what should i do ?

Well incase you don’t need the GPS feature and 3G being unavailable in India, buying an old Apple Iphone and upgrading it to firmware 2.0 might not be such a bad idea. Ofcourse check the fineprints.

8. Can i buy the Iphone 3G already in India ?

No but you may preregister the Iphone at both Airtel’s and Vodafone’s site.

9. Does the Iphone work on all continents ?

Yes, the Iphone is a quad band phone and will work on all continents, including Asia and North America.

10. I already have an Airtel and Vodafone account, will i have to change my number to get the Iphone 3G ?

Most probably no, whenever you sign up for a postpaid account, you are given the option of retaining your old number even if its prepaid. Iphone 3G plans should be no different.

11. Does the Iphone 3G’s GPS service work in India ?

The Iphone 3G’s GPS function is a global function and will definitely work in India, but as of now it will be very useless as Satguide and MapmyIndia, the two topmost routing providers in India dont have an Iphone 3G application yet. To use Google maps, you will need GPRS/Wifi to connect to internet and download maps, Google Maps are decent for Indian cities.

Original Iphone didnt have GPS.

12. Will Airtel/Vodafone Iphone 3G support EDGE ?

Yes it will.

13. How much will the Airtel and Vodafone Iphone 3G cost ?

This is a repeat question, but the fact is around 15000 Indian Rupees (INR) seems like the appropriate cost for  the Iphone 3G in India, the price could be higher, but definitely not lower. Apple will try and position it as a niche product so $199 cost is not feasible or appropriate. In US huge plan costs will help subside the phone cost but in India that cant be the case, most people love the freedom of prepaid unlike the USA.

14. Cant i buy the Iphone in America and come back to India ?

Apple and AT&T arent as stupid as you think, the Iphone is sold in USA with an AT&T contract. For the contract, AT&T will probably need your SSN and other identification documents. The phone plan like any other should have a security as well which would be forfeited if you try and rip AT&T or Apple off.

More FAQ will be added later,  Please correct us in comments if anything is wrong, also you are welcome to give your views, select comments may be incorporated in the post also.

Iphone Box Photo : Dan Taylor under CC 2.0 license

Well the Iphone 3G will soon have its worldwide launch, but India stands to miss out yet again. While the Iphone is being launched even as we speak , its interesting to note the implications of the launch on Indian Iphone 3G enthusiasts:

1. India will most probably have an August 2008 launch for the Iphone 3G, unlike the normal perception India is having a deferred launch for the new Iphone. This has been confirmed by both Airtel and Vodafone.

2. The first operator to launch the Iphone 3G would be Vodafone in India, its expected to be a soft launch with a limited number of handsets. Vodafone beat Airtel to getting to be the pioneer handset manufacturer to procure the sets. Airtel will ofcourse launch soon afterwards, or may delay the launch till Diwali in order to get better sales. It will be interesting to note how Airtel combats the advantage that Vodafone will have of launching the Iphone early on in India before anyone else.

3. The price, as you know price is THE most important factor in the Indian market. The original Iphone was infact never launched in India many say due to the pricing. Anyway, the Iphone will not be $199 in India. Most are expecting it to be anywhere from 12000 rupees to 14000 rupees.

Also, unlike last time you wont be able to import and unlock, as the Iphones will be exclusively store activated in the US,the plan desertion and leaving charges will be enormous, making importing the Iphone 3G an expensive affair.

Keep looking at this space for more Iphone infomation !

Every month your credit card statement comes with an insert with lots of offers. But do you realise that most of these so called ‘offers’ are selling you Chinese goods, smuggled grey market goods at prices greater than what the companies offer to regular customers.

You don’t! , let us take an example :

Please note we are not using any company name here, we will however be writing to a few companies to see their response.

This Credit Card company has tied up with one of the largest online retailers, but the prices quoted in exclusive offers to their customers is more than what normally one would have to pay:

We consider a 2GB quantum MP3 player, the cost for which is Rs.999 to all customers on the retailers website (shipping is free), but the exclusive offer for the credit card company’s customers is Rs.999 + Rs.200 shipping !

So the next time you feel tempted by an exclusive credit card offer that came with your statement, think again !

Well it is an important question in the world of today, more and more Indians are purchasing stuff online and importing it into India. But the question most people ask is the same. What about the customs duty?

Well to be frank with you, anything you have bought abroad and are bringing into India is chargeable as far as custom duties go except some duty free items like IT Products (Digital Camera, LCD Monitors,RAM,Processors etc., confirm the list though).

Seasoned ebay sellers and other online stores try to ensure that loyal Indian customers aren’t forced to shed customs at all. Remember you don’t need an IEC number to import stuff for personal use.

Here is what most companies do so that you don’t have to pay customs for importing stuff into India :

1. They mark the product as a gift on the customs declaration form of the package. This is illegal by the way , but there is no way to detect whether the thing is a gift or not. Unless the other person leaves an invoice inside the so called gift

2. Even after declaring the commodity as a gift, Indian customs will still charge it if the price is above Rs.10000 , so these ebay sellers under-declare the value of goods. This is a double edged sword, as if the product is stolen it would mean that you would not get the right price from insurance, so this can lead to losses.

Now both these steps do save duty to the importer, but you should realise they are probably illegal and be ready for consequences. Also keep in mind the more expensive the courier, the more closely the customs will examine your package. They know that EMS and DHL aren’t used for low value items, hence these packages are scrutinised more than others. On the same time Airmail and Registered Airmail is more prone to theft especially in India.

Now the fact is most genuine importers don’t mind paying a little duty on the products they are importing into India, but the customs are so notorious that most try to circumvent them, because they know if their package is caught by Indian customs, there will be a lot more paying up to do! Also if you are importing in bulk and you don’t have an IEC, you are in big trouble.

Another question people have is what happens if the customs find your item chargeable, dont worry no one will send you to jail unless you are importing prohibited stuff. If your item is found chargeable, your package will be seized by customs and you will be sent a letter usually asking you for purpose of import etc. Be truthful while replying. If customs are satisfied with your reply, then they will calculate the appropriate customs duty and send the postman to your home who collects the duty and delivers your shipment. As easy as that. There is a small fine too for mis-declarations. Frequent mis-declarations will get you in trouble though. So be on the right side of the law. In case you have questions, feel free to ask via comments. Also this is not legal advice, hire a lawyer if you need legal advice.

Well last year’s experience of MCD online tax paying had went smoothly, this year was a little different, some minor glitches along the way.

Firstly MCD tells you that they issued you a password last year, my property tax receipt didnt have any password, people have suggested emailing MCD to get a password.

Anyway once you are through with registering and all, the new interface has the advantage of clubbing all your tax payments together, so you can take a print of your receipt any time you like. You might also be able to make multi property payments (not sure about it).

Anyway the payment methods multiplied this year, now you can pay online via Axis Bank gateway, HDFC Bank Gateway and ITZ Cash Cards. You can also pay with cheques by depositing them in select HDFC and Axis Bank Branches. But who uses a cheque when you got a credit card , they do charge a transaction fee though, to offset the gateway costs.

I paid with my HDFC Credit Card. The site does not support verified by VISA or Mastercard Secure Code which was disappointing to say the least. Verified by VISA and Mastercard Securecard add an extra layer of security to your transactions.

The payment went smoothly, but then the MCD site had another glitch. The receipt wasnt being generated, finally i realised the problem. The pdf receipt was being generated as a .do file, so i renamed it to .pdf and finally my property tax payment was complete online.

Ah well, i am very much in love with the great service offered by futurebazaar.com, and its no news to most people. Therefore i was disappointed when my recent orders took 2 weeks to be processed and delivered. My first ever futurebazaar.com order took only 3 days to be in my hands. But since then while their service in general is impeccable towards me, the loss in speed is very much noticeable.

Recently i had placed a large order with them consisting of 4-5 items, and the last of them were delivered only 1 month after the order had been placed which is slow by any standards.

One of the items costing around 600 rupees was received broken, but Futurebazaar was kind enough to get it replaced. The item was picked up from my home within 2 days by their courier (not TNT) and seamlessly a new order was placed and i got the item in a short period. But coming back to the speed issue :

All these speed problems point to the fact that futurebazaar.com is working on thin stock and has been having problems with fulfilling orders due to small stocks and when they do run out it takes a long time for them to replenish stock. The average shipout time on their site is constant at 4.8 days for a loooooong time now and it seems they have stopped updating it for obvious reasons. They use Bluedart couriers which are definitely one of the fastest in India, so the problem is not the courier.

Whatever the problems hope futurebazaar.com ramps up their supply chain management and is able to deliver fast and good service like i am used to from them

Also it would be great if futurebazaar.com actually gave AWBs to people after orders are shipped, Indiatimes and Homeshop18 have this facility , then why not futurebazaar ?

Is anyone at the future group listening ?

I had been planning this online photo service comparison for a long time but frankly time is sort of a luxury these days. Here is a side by side review of Snapfish and Zoom.in India. Please note we used these services in India only.

Uploading - Snapfish sort of scores here with easy and hassle free uploading. Zoom.in was more difficult to work with. Infact i had almost given up on them telling their support that i was moving on as i was unable to upload photos. Even Picasa uploading which was all online was taking forever. Later on i was able to upload the photos. But it turns out things arent tuned for Indian broadband settings. Out of the photos i was uploading , the server would cancel about every 4th photo due to apparent break in connection (first time i noticed this happening on a website). Anyway they should have a better engine which sort of supports resume.

Snapfish Rating: , Zoom.in Rating:

Ordering - Zoom.in uses cc avenue as their payment processors, being a third party their is always a chance of their server not being pinged properly about the payment and your order being delayed. Happened to me once with Tata Sky, they asked me to give a refrence number, it took me 3 days to get the payment reflected and i was without satellite TV till then.

Hp Snapfish on the other hand processes payments itself, which is sort of better for this kind of a thing.

Snapfish Rating: Zoom.in Rating:

Customer Care - HP Snapfish’s customer care is robotic. I had given them feedback on my first experience and i got a copy pasted reply. I dont even think it was forwarded anywhere. Zoom.in on the other hand has a very warm customer care, infact they gave me extra free prints after i told them of the problems i was facing. Also they tried to help me troubleshoot my problem and asked me to hang on in there.

Snapfish Rating: Zoom.in Rating:

Order Time - Snapfish overshot their estimated date by three days, Zoom.in were dot on time. Snapfish didnt even offer an apology when i complained about the order not being received 2 days after the estimated date. They replied 3 days later that the order has been delivered. You need to talk to your customer better.

Snapfish Rating: Zoom.in Rating:

Print Quality - Here Zoom.in had glossier and better looking prints, i had kept one print same in both the albums to compare. HP uses their own print paper which didnt look so good to me, Zoom.in uses Kodak Royal paper which is pretty good. Also the colours were slightly better with Zoom.in

Snapfish Rating: Zoom.in Rating:

Pricing - To the naked eye, Snapfish looks better in terms of pricing. But a closer look reveals an exhorbant courier cost associated which kind of nullifies the advantage, in fact it adds to the cost making it costlier than Zoom.in. HP does give an album, but they advertise it as free, so i take their word.

Snapfish Rating: Zoom.in Rating:

Both companies have a promising future ahead of them, just that we seemed to like Zoom.in better than snapfish. Working on their cost and customer service will definitely serve HP better. Zoom.in needs to ramp up its software (uploading) and it would be pretty good then. A lot of prospective customers must be lost by it when people have problems uploading. Also Zoom.in needs to give proper albums with orders, a few of my relatives to whom i had shown my photos were ruing the fact that the photos were not in an album for easy handling.

Final Score

I would love to use expletives in this review but will not stoop so low. But the product quality from Homeshop18 stooped low enough. Their service might not be bad but their sellers are committing frauds and homeshop18 is turning a blind eye to them.

We had ordered a 2GB mini SD card from Homeshop18, they claimed it was a Sandisk card, so we bought it. On receiving the product it was found that it was actually a cheap Chinese fake which didn’t even work. The card was very cleverly put in a Kingston SD adaptor to fool the non-techie users into thinking that the product was of Kingston. So it was not the Sandisk product advertised on Homeshop18 but a cheap Chinese. A lot of people are constantly being cheated in this way, many people are not aware of this modus operandi of the homeshop18 seller.

I wrote them a letter and they asked me to return the product which we did. Almost two weeks after the package had been delivered the return was acknowledged. I got my money back, but here are the things where Homeshop18 hits absolute rock bottom :

1. The seller had committed an absolute fraud on me, see the photos below to know what i mean :

The product on top is the product promised to me, the lower one is what i received, a cheap Chinese fake in a Kingston adapter. It was wrapped in polyethene.

2. The product continued to be on sale for a long time and still is, i can imagine more and more people are getting cheated.

3. I am yet to be refunded my courier costs for the whole transaction for which i have written to them many times. Hopefully when someone from their company reads this review they will expedite the process of my courier cost refund.

Also Pehredaar (CNBC TV18’s show which exposes frauds) can easily do a full-fledged show on Homeshop18.

Rating:
The Zero rating is for this particular transaction, i am poorer by 180 rupees which was my courier cost and is yet to be refunded. I would give it a (.5/5) when i get my money back.

Later Edit : They refunded me my courier costs after writing them an email a day, probably because when you search for their site, this review comes up. Anyway, the new rating is

Rating: (Not Recommended)

Ok this was a long time in the coming, on being told that HP had launched a photo printing service here in India under the name Snapfish and that they were giving 20 free prints to everyone who signed up for their service, I knew I had to try it.

So I signed up and saw that I already had a sample album and had been credited 20 free prints. Obviously nothing is free in this world , the free prints have the inbuilt courier charges into them, more on that later.

So I uploaded photos from one of our trips to their site, they also had a bulk upload software, but after using HP director, I have a hard time trusting some of the scripts which they use, somehow they are always able to crash my Internet Explorer.

So I ordered for 20 prints which cost me 43.82 rupees ($1 approx. as courier charges), and was given a tentative shipping date. The shipping date came and went, but my order was not shipped, it was shipped around 2 days after the estimated shipping date and this ticked me off. The photo status was printed within a few hours of the order being placed, but their logistics are bad. A letter to their customer care about the need for faster response got a cold robotic reply. Not expected !

So here are the hits and misses for HP Snapfish ::

HITS :

1. Easy to use service
2. Name of HP attached (bound to be good)
3. Cheap in terms of print costs(more on this later)

MISSES ::

This deserves a paragraph really, for one I expected the photos to be printed by HP itself, but to my horror and dismay, I found that HP is actually outsourcing the job to a photographer. Now why the hell would I order from HP again, I could go to the photo shop who sent me the photos and take out HP’s commission. What I strongly suspect is that the Snapfish thing is a photo shop with HP photo paper and a HP photo printer and that’s the way they are working.

Also Rs. 43 for courier is too high by any standard, the package was less than 500gms. It was sent by bluedart who are expensive but I expected HP to negotiate better. I mean futurebazaar charges only 1 rupee shipping on products costing 49 rupees. They too send by bluedart although I am sure their volumes are super huge.

VERDICT :
So all said and done, I didn’t really feel Excited or Nice about using the service. Ordinary Experience. Kind of felt ripped off even after the 20 free prints. Photo quality is good though, the free album isnt.

Rating:

Tell us how you liked our HP Snapfish Review !

Ok now this is hilarious, Headphones with upgradable firmware. I wonder if i should buy the headphones and then sue Futurebazaar