NEW DELHI, INDIA – Bharti Airtel has announced to launch Apple iPhone 3G on midnight of 22nd August across six cities in the country.

The phone will initially be available in Hyderabad, Bangalore and the other four metropolitan cities, and later will be introduced in other 65 cities.

It will be available in two models, one with eight GB memory (in black colour) for Rs 31,000 and another 16 GB (white and black) for Rs 36,100.

Vodafone, service provider for Apple in India, will also launch the iPhone 3G at the same time.

iPhone 3G comes with 3G wireless technology, GPS mapping, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange, and the new App Store. And like the original iPhone, it combines three products in one — a revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and an Internet device with rich HTML email and a desktop-class web browser.

The phone will be available at Airtel's stores and Apple's resellers across the country.

"However, India does not yet have any 3G networks operational, so Airtel has cautioned that some of the phone's capabilities will not be immediately available upon launch", said Sanjay Kapoor, Airtel president (mobility).

The government has announced plans to auction 3G spectrum this year, and the commercial roll out of 3G services is expected only in the first half next year.

Airtel has received 200,000 pre-bookings for the phone since the process had started about two months back, Kapoor said.

The phone comes locked to the service provider, which means a user cannot switch his or her operator while using an iPhone.

However, the availability of a number of software in the market for hacking the iPhone does not go unnoticed by the telecom operator.

"The customers who will stay with Airtel will be able to enjoy iPhone's full benefits including the data plans,' Kapoor said.

Currently, there are more than 30,000 iPhone users in India using the iPhones 2G, available in the grey market in India, Kapoor added.