Following a report from Marbridge Consulting yesterday claiming that sources within China Telecom had revealed that a deal had been struck with Apple for the iPhone 4S, China Daily reports that China Telecom subsidiary Beijing Telecom has confirmed plans for an iPhone 4S release as soon as late February.
In a news release on Monday, Beijing Telecom Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China Telecom, said the CDMA-version iPhone 4S is likely to hit the domestic market by the end of February, or at the beginning of March. However, no pricing details were disclosed.
"China Telecom has already started preparatory work for the launch of the iPhone 4S," according to the press release.
With the iPhone 4S being a world-mode device capable of operating on both GSM and CDMA networks, previous regulatory approvals that were required to allow the device to be launched by Apple's long-standing partner carrier China Unicom earlier this month helped pave the way for the device to make its way to China Telecom.
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China Telecom currently has over 125 million subscribers on its mobile services, with over 36 million of those on its 3G network as of December 2011, nearly three times the 12 million 3G subscribers the carrier had one year earlier. The addition of China Telecom will leave China Mobile, the world's largest carrier, as the only one of China's three major carriers lacking the iPhone. Efforts on a China Mobile iPhone have been slowed by the carrier's use of TD-SCDMA technology for its 3G network, technology that would require specially-designed iPhone hardware to run on the network.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Why? It's an inconvenient truth so that we can all have our precious gadgets. As long as I've got the cash, who cares about the human rights toll, right? :apple:
The Foxcon employees are much much more politically empowered by their comparatively high wage manufacturing jobs than they would be if they had remained subsistence level farmers. Remember, these guys live under a communist dictatorship. China's continued focus on capitalist successes, like Foxcon, is actually bringing greater and greater political freedom to that country. The communist party remains the sole political power, but they have to make freedom concessions to the capitalists in order to continue to feed the economic expansion.
If you want to feel sorry for anyone in China, feel sorry for the 100s of millions of impoverished peasants. Don't cry for the Foxcon employees, they are far from the bottom of the economic food chain in China.
I think iPhone 4S sales in China will improve if and when Siri supports Mandarin and Cantonese. So far, the Siri beta supports 3 English accents, French, and German.
And, come to think of it, I think iPhone 4S sales would improve if Siri supported Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, etc. (And the different accents of some of those languages. Ever hear Swiss German being spoken?)
All I can think about is the increased production, and that additional stress on FoxConn employees. It makes me sad :(
#StandTall
It would be nice to have an iPhone production article without having to drag this topic in every single time.
Perhaps we should take this discussion to current front page article about how desirable Foxcon jobs are in China.
But I have to reply specifically to your suggest that Apple voluntarily pay more to the manufacturing companies for their product. I do not believe that those higher payments would result in a meaningful amount of it trickling down to the factory floor workers. Apple could try to set wage control minimums, but that would be very hard to enforce and the companies might extract those additional wages through another means (higher rent for the on the on campus housing, for example). Also such decision to give away cash would not be in best interest of shareholders, which the Board of Directors and the company Officers have a legal obligation to consider.
China is raising it's minimum wages by huge percentage.
China province raises minimum wage by 23%
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16311751 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16311751)