China Mobile Hits 10 Million iPhone Users Despite Lack of Agreement with Apple

I'm one of these 10 million china mobile customers who use iPhone on their 2g network..

And around my friends and families, there are about 15 of them using china mobile 2g, only less than 5 people got their iPhone through contract with china Unicom and have access to 3G network.

However this does not bother most people. China mobiles 2g network isn't that bad..The edge network is fast enough in doing emails and instant messaging, and its cheap.. I pay about 5 us dollars to get 300mb of data each month, it's more than enough.

Of course everyone would prefer a faster network. The real problem is that you cannot carry your phone number to other carriers. People like me have been using the same china mobile number for the past 10 years and I cannot afford to change. We had to purchase the iPhone handset separately.

So you can say there are 10 million customers waiting to see the real iPhone 5 comes with china mobile deal, and are all going to upgrade once it's available..

Steve is going to be happy to see this in heaven.

Wonder how many of those are counterfeits.

:D

Qualcomm's next generation LTE chip will support this LTE standard.

Hint hint.

over 600 million customers.

Thats crazy!! :eek:

over 600 million customers.

Thats crazy!! :eek:

^what he said. :)

Considering the subscriber numbers that China Mobile has and the interest in the iPhone demonstrated by the percentage of total iPhone users on the carrier even without it being officially offered, you can see how much growth potential Apple has in China. And, I suppose, why selling unlocked iPhones from the West to the East is so profitable. It always struck me as funny that the devices are often assembled in China and shipped to the West only to make their way back onto the gray market there.
No wonder Apple has put major efforts into establishing a stronger retail presence in China. The new Shanghai and Hong Stores look amazing.

So that's where all the iPhone 4s are :eek:

Well, we have the same problem in the U.S. with T-Mobile. As a recent article pointed, it's up to Apple to make an iPhone compatible with T-Mobile's 3G network. As far as I know it's just a different frequency than AT&T's, not a different standard, so why is so difficult to expand the frequency range on the radio chipset? Maybe Apple considers it a minority, as T-Mobile Germany uses the same frequency as AT&T.

It's not just expanding the range on a chipset, they would have to re-design the antenna system to function reasonably well on a wider range of frequencies. This, as well as a baseband that supports them, would likely consume more power and decrease battery life. Much like the iPhone 4S has a lower standby time likely due in part because of a more power hungry qualcomm baseband that supports both CDMA and GSM and handles 800, 850, 900, 1800, 1900, & 2100MHz frequencies. Should the AT&T / T-Mobile merger go through the 1900MHz AWS spectrum gained from T-Mobile will likely be used along with the 700MHz AWS spectrum AT&T already has to roll out a significantly improved LTE network. I don't think T-Mobile on it's own will see an iPhone, unless they all of a sudden plan to dump a ton of $$ into acquiring additional spectrum to deploy LTE on their 1900MHz AWS and I don't see a company that is struggling and trying to find a buyer planning on pouring money into their network.

Qualcomm's next generation LTE chip will support this LTE standard.

Hint hint.

China Mobile users will likely have an official way to upgrade to a new iPhone and have use of their networks 4G TD-LTE and 3G TD-SCDMA if Apple does in fact jump on the LTE train with the iPhone 6 in 2012. As Apple has said it's exploring LTE but current chipsets are just too power hungry. If Qualcomm is able to get their next-gen LTE chipset to be significantly more power efficient and use a lot less power at idle we just might see an LTE iPhone at the end of 2012. I'm thinking it might get bumped to 2013 unless Qualcomm works some magic.

Will CM actually start selling the iPhone even though data throughput is crippled?