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In your Palm A happy wedding of gaming, browsing, entertainment and work features

Set to work in the 3G spectrum with a whole set of new features, this iPhone is likely to be a bigger success story than the earlier one.

The rumour mills are swirling: it will have speeds of up to five times the current EDGE speed that is available in India, real GPS, better keyboard support, upgraded camera (iChat also?) plus a host of other features.

The good news for a change is that the iPhone is likely to be launched in September in India. The bad news is that the phones to be released in India are most likely to be the ones that were launched last year and not the 3G ones with roaring Internet speeds and the rumoured features.

You can get a bought-in-the-U.S.-by-a-cousin 3G model in India but you will not be able to use the features.

The salivating folks have thought of the most imaginative ways to find out about the iPhones without much success, if one bloke has calculated Steve Jobs’ air miles, another has gone to the U.S. customs department to find out strange shipments, another website is advising what to do in the stakeout line for the new iPhones right down to the portable potty and a shower. Crazy? You bet.

Unlike in the U.S., Apple has signed deals with both Vodafone and Airtel (through SingTel) for launching the phones in India. But none of the Indian companies are ready with the 3G technology as the spectrum auction has been hanging fire for the past two years.

Only now, the Department of Telecommunication has announced its plan to grant fresh licenses to the successful bidders of spectrum for 3G mobile services. With this one stroke, any foreign company can bid for the spectrum and rollout 3G services nullifying the infrastructure of the established players.

There lies the rub and the legal tangle. While TRAI wants the spectrum auction to be restricted to existing operators, the Finance Ministry is in favour of going for an international competitive bidding (one licensee paid $4.1 billion in the U.S.).

The Finance Ministry’s decision is not difficult to divine. While the sarkar and its mandarins play ball with the spectrum, Indians again will be reduced to spectators of the unfolding 3G revolution.

Pity, considering the fact the smart phones with their happy wedding of gaming, browsing, entertainment and work features are set to make dinosaurs out of the PCs and laptops.

The iPhone has been the first to crack the separation of frill-less business phones and the bells and whistles phones with cameras, songs, video player and games.

As these phones grow in numbers and with younger folks toting them, one more frontier is being redrawn: that of gaming. The clever user interface of iPhone is the perfect base to launch a gaming career. If the 3G gets delayed any further, the fast maturing Indian cellphone industry will go back to the rut it was in.

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