Sunday, September 28, 2008

"Cut Down" iPhone will finally be launched in China soon


China Mobile is expected to officially launch the Apple iPhone on its network shortly but with some of the functionality removed to comply with Chinese regulations and of course no revenue sharing agreement. The South China Morning Post, citing a report from the Daiwa Institute of Research said that the 3G and Wi-Fi services would be disabled on the Chinese model.

China Mobile has been in on/off talks with Apple ever since the iPhone was launched. The talks broke down in January but resumed again in July.

While its a great news for the Chinese mobile market, but I m not too sure whether many Chinese will want to buy an iPhone with the wifi and 3G disabled. The user experience will lack severely. Downloading videos and YouTube would not be possible. And you can forget about MMS as well.

From my point of view, its simply unappealing for Apple to market the cut-down iPhone version for the Chinese market.

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