Update: UK Ad Authorities have declared iPhone ad as “misleading”. I guess then they should declare it plain fraud in India.
This is a short rant about two of the “big” products launched recently in India in the last one week and how the people behind their sales/marketing teams either try to take the Indian customer for a ride, or shaft themselves.
iPhone: The big icon. Bharti Airtel/Vodafone claimed lakhs of pre-registrations, yet no one lined up to buy it. Anyways, to the point. The ads all over the print, digital and broadcast media in India list out 3 major points in one sentence:
1. **A 3G Phone:** My a$$. They haven't even finalized auction details for 3G spectrum in India yet.
2. **Desktop Class Browser:** Without Flash?
3. **Push E-mail:** Oh, the one that Apple already pulled the plug on?
Anyways, even if this were to be true, nobody would have bought it for the steep price for something that hardly even performs properly as a phone.
BIG TV: This is the “real” big one, from the stable of none other than Reliance/Anil Dhirubhai Ambani. Ok, it’s supposed to be good, very good. I checked out their website to see how good. What do I get?
1. A flash only site. No fallback. Did they get it coded from a high-school flash junkie?
2. After 15 minutes of looking around clicking on 10s of links, going in circles, I'm still confused. What exactly are their packages. There are so many rates and offers floating around. Everything promising something different, but wait, not available for your region. There are so many channels, more than your current DTH, but one second, WHAT exactly are thos channels. No list? For all I care, they could be endless streams of Doordarshan and ETV regional ones. (Please repeat the question I asked in point 1 here again)
Makes me wonder, do they really want to sell anything or Anil just made this out for fun, having a roaring time watching realtime website logs seeing people getting stuck and frustrated in the maze.