Apple's iPhone Deal With China Unicom Not Exclusive

Unlike the rest of the world, when you negotiate with China Telecom, you have China the government, at the table. China's demands superceed the needs and desires of the other parties CT and AAPL.

That makes any outcome at all very difficult, and one that is beneficial to CT, AAPL and consumers nearly impossible. This will be a crippled device offering more services than other handset providers, but not the full feature set the providers are willing and able to provide.

I guess here it is a little like ATT banning tethering, VoIP, and video resend services to manage bandwidth. Except in this case China is making sure all traffic is visible to them and there are no easy ways to prevent that.

Haven't they heard of Echelon?

:)

Rocketman

Competition!

Wow, looks like Chinese consumers are going to have it better than us when it comes to choice. Who would have ever thought that. I hope the FCC sees just exactly what it is allowing the evil at&t to get away with.

Note to Steve Jobs: End the at&t exclusivity already!
Note to the FCC: It is obvious that at&t is stifling consumer choice. End the exclusivity!

Competition!

Wow, looks like Chinese consumers are going to have it better than us when it comes to choice. Who would have ever thought that. I hope the FCC sees just exactly what it is allowing the evil at&t to get away with.

Note to Steve Jobs: End the at&t exclusivity already!
Note to the FCC: It is obvious that at&t is stifling consumer choice. End the exclusivity!

Be careful who you blame. There are two signatories to that exclusivity contract.

Rocketman

China's crippled iPhone has everything except for Wi-Fi, which is not that big of a deal. Most people in China use pay-as-you-go and not contracts. The rates are cheap and most of the internet related tasks on the iPhone require little bandwidth. Mobile providers want to earn money from people using 3G (which is far more efficient that most countries and extremely speedy) rather than Wi-Fi, it's understandable.

However, here in the States, we are being f***ed and screwed over by AT&T for MMS. They promised late summer and still we haven't gotten squat. That is definitely NOT understandable, their shoddy 3G coverage and deaf ears to the customers.

Apple doesn't care which company they go with as a service provider in China; all Apple wants to know is "where do I send the 5,000,000 iPhones to and when?" :eek:

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China's crippled iPhone has everything except for Wi-Fi, which is not that big of a deal. Most people in China use pay-as-you-go and not contracts. The rates are cheap and most of the internet related tasks on the iPhone require little bandwidth. Mobile providers want to earn money from people using 3G (which is far more efficient that most countries and extremely speedy) rather than Wi-Fi, it's understandable.

However, here in the States, we are being f***ed and screwed over by AT&T for MMS. They promised late summer and still we haven't gotten squat. That is definitely NOT understandable, their shoddy 3G coverage and deaf ears to the customers.

If the iPhone doesn't have Wi-Fi, many apps in the app store will be useless, such as Remote, GoodReader, AirSharing, etc...

it has been proved that the iphones sold in china have no wifi.

If the iPhone doesn't have Wi-Fi, many apps in the app store will be useless, such as Remote, GoodReader, AirSharing, etc...

As if 99% of the apps in the app store are of any use to the average Chinese consumer.