Josh Ong for AppleInsider:
Investment bank Morgan Stanley believes Apple will partner up with both China Telecom and China Mobile “over the next year” to make its iPhone available on all three Chinese carriers, a move that could bring incremental sales of as many as 40 million units next calendar year.
This is predicated on Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty’s assumption that the next-generation iPhone will work on the TD-LTE network favored by China Mobile. But given the company’s position as China’s largest base of high-end phone subscribers, it’s safe to assume that Apple is very interested in getting the iPhone into China Mobile’s customers as soon as it’s feasible. (Apple current sells phones to the Chinese market through China Unicom, a competitor of China Mobile.)
Don’t they know this will just encourage the poor working conditions of those Chinese factory workers?
This whole situation is very weird. On the one hand China Mobile is very large, very powerful and very slow moving. They won’t let a phone on their network that doesn’t meet certain security aspects (by which I of course mean security for the government, not the consumer).
On the other hand the iPhone is already being used on China Unicom’s network, whether they are legitimate iPhones or from the grey market.
I don’t really see Apple producing yet another version of the iPhone, featuring another kind of communication standard.
OTOH China Mobile’s subscriber base is gigantic and I’ve heard many of my friends during my semester in Beijing long for an iPhone on China Mobile.
Still, I somehow don’t see this happening in 2012, as LTE is still too power hungry to make it a viable solution.