In the United States and several other countries, Apple has sold millions of iPhone devices. But in China there has not been a good number of sales whatsoever. China Unicom reportedly sold only about 5,000 iPhones in a week. Two of the biggest problems with selling the iPhone in China so far is that the price is too high and it does not come bundled with WiFi.
The iPhone costs $1,025 in China while it costs $299 in the United States with an AT&T contract. China Unicom is selling the iPhone for a price that is 26% higher than what it is selling for in Hong Kong.
“We believe that eventually China will emerge as a major market for iPhone sales, but it could take a year or two to gain meaningful unit traction as it did in the U.S.,” stated Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster.
The Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone is now available in China through the China Unicom telecommunications company. The problem with the iPhone in China is that there isn’t any built in WiFi. Apple did this in order to comply with a government regulation. In China the iPhone costs between 4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025).
Given the high price in China, it seems unlikely that the phone will be as big of a hit there as it was in America. That seems unfortunate considering that the iPhone is manufactured in Shenzhen. WiFi was banned by the Chinese government in order to replace it with WAPI technology. WAPI stands for WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure. WAPI was rejected by the ISO and was one of the reasons for a U.S. and China Trade dispute.
“We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year,” stated Unicom spokesman Yi Difei. Do you think that this will hinder people in China from buying the device?
Kris Rowley is the CISO of the state of Vermont. While she went hiking, a bear had approached her. Rowley backed away slowly, but the bear come coming closer. The only thing Rowley had to toss at the bear to distract it was her iPhone.
“In a semi-panic, I threw the phone at the bear,” stated Rowley in an interview with CIO.com. It turns out that there was an “app for that” bear. Because the phone distracted the bear while Rowley had a chance to escape. Later on Rowley wanted to get her phone back so she took a bat and went back to the scene. It turns out that the iPhone was not edible enough for the bear. The iPhone was laying in place where it was thrown with teeth and claw marks all over it.
Rowley took the iPhone to the Apple store to see if there’s anything they can do. But the Geniuses at the Apple retail store did not believe her story. “I had to buy a new phone or forfeit my contract if I canceled, so I purchased a new phone at full price,” added Rowley. “While saddened about my mangled iPhone, better the phone than me.”
Directed Electronics has launched an iPhone application that allows users to start their cars remotely. This is a perfect application to have if you live in a place where it snows during thte winter. The application is free [iTunes link], but having a Viper remote system installed on your vehicle will cost you.
Some of the features built in to the application includes unlocking, locking, a trunk opener, panic button, and alerts. You can also manage multiple cars assuming all of them have Viper is installed on them. It is assumed that the application works through satellite because the company claims the range is “virtually unlimited.” Let’s say that you leave the state and forgot that your car at home was unlocked, this would be a good app for you to have.
However the cost of the SmartStart systems is rough on the wallet. The SmartStart system has a retail price of $499 and the SmartStart module costs $299 for existing Viper customers. The Viper SmartStart can be bought from Best Buy as of right now.
When 38-year-old Donald Goodrich walked into the Apple store at the Kenwood Towne Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio he probably did not know he was going to end up being arrested shortly after. Goodrich was upset that his iPhone was not working properly and he told an Apple employee that he was upset. As a matter of fact, Goodrich stated he was, “So mad, I could pop a 9mm at it.”
The Apple employee told the employee that there wasn’t a need for shooting the iPhone. Goodrich insisted “I’ll do it right now. Look!” After that, he took opened his shirt which had a 9mm hand gun in it. The employee said that she’d get the iPhone fixed, but told the manager to cal the police. Goodrich was charged with aggravated menacing and causing fear of harm to the employee.
Goodrich was also charged with a concealed weapons charge for not telling the police he had a gun. However Goodrich did have a concealed weapons permit. The incident took place on October 1.
When Manoj Gupta walked into the Apple store in the SoHo area of New York, he did not expect the employees at the Genius Bar to tell him that his phone is acting normally. Gupta came in to find out why his iPhone was dropping so many calls. It turns out that the average iPhone user in New York was seeing a 30% dropped call rate, while Gupta’s iPhone was seeing about a 22% dropped call rate.
The Genius Bar at the Apple store found out how Gupta’s iPhone was performing by doing a stat dump. Since Gupta’s phone was acting normally, they could not really do much to fix his phone. AT&T does plan on launching a service to improve the wireless service within a household or office by using 3G micro cells, but improving the overall service around the country will take the telecommunications company some time.
Essentially what this means for iPhone users in New York is that you are getting the shaft. However AT&T does plan to add wireless spectrum to the Big Apple as announced earlier this month. If you live in New York and have an iPhone, please let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.
China Unicom is planning to start selling the Apple iPhone in the most populated country in the world starting October 15. The price is expected to be 1,999 yuan ($293) to buy the phone for an 8GB model. And the 16GB model is expected to be 2,999 yuan ($439). Both of the models will need a 2 year contract to buy the phones at those prices. The phone plans will begin at 186 yuan ($27) making it very affordable. Apple and China Unicom have a 3 year agreement.
The communication regulators in South Korea has officially approved the Apple iPhone. Before the country had a ban that blocked the product from entering the country. The Korea Communications Commission made an exception to a rule that require mobile phones in the Asian country to use domestic technologies for location based services.
Telecommunications company KT Corp. has been having discussions with the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) about bringing the phone to the Korean country. Bringing the iPhone to Korea will be interesting because the market is already saturated by Samsung and LG mobile phones.
South Korea made the rule exception shortly after China did. The exception was made months after consumers were pressuring the Commission.
iMo is a startup that launched out of the TechCrunch50 conference that aims to make the iPhone or iPod Touch act as a gaming controller for PC games. Most PC games use a mouse and keyboard to play but sometimes people prefer to play with a wireless controller. This is where iMo’s future application comes in. iMo’s application would make the Apple iPhone or Apple iPod Touch work as a wireless controller.
The application would communicate with the PC through a WiFi or Bluetooth connection. iMo will cost $0.99 on the Apple App Store and the application will be available on the Google Android Market in the future too. Below is a video demo of the presentation from TechCrunch50.
Previously Apple announced that MMS will be available to iPhone users for a monthly fee starting on September 25th. However there are reports indicating that some people now have access to the feature. The MMS roll out has been extremely random for select phones to perhaps determine the type of load that AT&T will be dealing with when there is a full roll out. Users in Europe already have access to the MMS feature since iPhone OS 3.0 rolled out about 3 months ago.
A man was able to retrieve his possessions from a few armed robbers thanks to his iPhone and his MobileMe account. The victim was not identified by the police. Here’s how it all went down.
Around 1AM near the intersection of Amberson Ave. and Amberson Pl. in Pittsburgh, a man was robbed at gunpoint. The two men asked for his wallet, PIN number for his credit cards, and his iPhone. After taking the man’s possessions, they ran off towards Ellsworth Ave.
Officers arrived at the scene while the man was cancelling his credit cards. And then the victim used Apple’s MobileMe service to determine the location of his iPhone. It turns out his iPhone was tracked down at the Wal-Mart in North Versailles where the police started following the suspects. The suspects purchased items with the stolen credit cards and then moved over to an Eat’n Park restaurant on Route 30.
The suspects were arrested there and had a black pellet gun along with stolen cash, IDs, and credit cards. The three men charged include Bryant Rather (pictured above), Brent Ray Potter, and Myron Knox Jr. They will be charged with two counts of access device fraud, receiving stolen property, possessing instruments of crime, and conspiracy. Rather and Potter are also being charged with robbery.
China Unicom and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) have made a deal to sell the iPhone in China. That is great news for Apple iPhone developers because their customer base grow even bigger. Currently in China, there are about 687 million wireless subscribers.
The iPhone will be sold in China in the fourth quarter. And the China Unicom and Apple deal has been signed for about a 3 year contract. According to The Wall Street Journal China Unicom will not be sharing revenue with Apple but will buy them on wholesale and resell it to consumers.
The good news for Chinese consumers is that China Unicom will be subsidizing the phone. But there is no word on how much it will be subsidized. India on the other hand does not currently have any subsidizing phone making it harder for consumers there to afford it.
China Unicom has about 141 million subscribers as of this past July. China Unicom hopes to attract more high-end consumers. China Unicom will be rolling out a 3G network now. The 3G network will be launched by September 28.
One of the problems with launching the iPhone in this market is that there are already a good number of iPhone owners in China. About 1.5 million iPhones are floating around China that have been bought from overseas and have been jailbroken.
The Apple iPhone will soon be launching in the most populated country in the world. A testing center for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has confirmed a government license for an iPhone prototype that was modified for the Chinese market.
It is uncertain how many licenses Apple must receive in order to sell the mobile device in China. But Apple has nearly completed the negotiations necessary to have China Unicom distribute the phone.
An analyst Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong anticipates that the phone should be available as early as October. China currently has about 687 million mobile phone users whereas the U.S. has about 270 million.
Up until recently there was no way to receive push notifications for e-mail through GMail on the iPhone. However an application called GPush has been added to the iTunes App Store earlier this month.
Push notifications are one of the biggest advantages that BlackBerry mobile phones had over the iPhone before the iPhone OS 3.0 was released. The application does not open or send e-mails, it literally only sends push notifications. GPush was developed by Tiverias Apps.
GPush is easy to set up. All you have to do is submit your user name and password. After entering the information, you just have to agree to let the app send you push notifications. The application still has several bugs, but it still works pretty well.
YouTube user mringwal uploading a video of the iPhone working with a Wiimote. The iPhone is launched in AirPlane mode activated before starting an OpenGL-ES Demo. The demo pulls up a 3D image of a Wiimote and monitors the orientation of the console controller using Bluetooth. In this demo, the BTstack project was used along with a tutorial of OpenGL-ES code by Simon Maurice.
