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.
RealNetworks’ streaming music software Rhapsody-To-Go will be submitted to the Apple App Store for approval this week. When the application gets approved, Rhapsody customers will be able to access on-demand streaming of over 8 million tracks within the company’s library through 3G and WiFi connections.
The application will work with the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPod Touch. Currently a Rhapsody membership costs about $14.99 per month, but the application itself will be free. Next RealNetworks will be working on a Google Android version of their application.
Spotify, a Rhapsody competitor submitted an application back in July too. Currently Spotify is not available for download in the U.S. The announcement was made on the Rhapsody blog.
Although Apple iPhone sales have shot up 365% in the second quarter, Research In Motion still dominates the smartphone market in the U.S. In the second quarter of the economy, smartphone shipments increased a total of about 13.4%.
Research In Motion and their BlackBerry devices control about 52% of the smartphone market. But their control in the market is weakening as the Apple iPhone marketshare is starting to increase at a rapid pace. The Apple iPhone now has about 23.3% of the smartphone market.
The statistics in the survey was compiled by market research firm Canalys.
“RIM has successfully expanded its product portfolio to include a wide selection of devices and interfaces that appeal to a range of customers at different price points,” stated Canalys VP and principal analyst Chris Jones. “This includes 2.5G models that are smaller, lighter, lower cost, and have better battery life than most of its 3G rivals.”
HTC’s smartphone marketshare in the U.S. dropped to 5.6% from 8%. Marketshare of smartphones powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile have also dropped. Nokia has about a 44% market share in total handsets. RIM’s global share went up to 21% from 16.7% from the previous year.
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.
Over the last few days, Boy Genius Report has received a couple tips that Apple will be announcing an 8GB version of the iPhone 3GS soon. The above screen shot is a memo from Rogers to employees about the shipping of an 8GB version of the iPhone. With an 8GB version of the 3GS, it is likely that the iPhone 3G will be phased out of production. Given economies of scale, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple sells an 8GB 3GS for $99 with two year contract too.
A few developers at iSoft used a Bochs emulator and the original Windows 95 image to port the operating system over to the iPhone. Yes I admit that having Windows on an iPhone is an atrocity, but it just proves how talented the developers at iSoft are. The above demo showcases the developers wandering around in the file manager, changing around the property settings, and even playing a game of Minesweeper.
The iPhone finance section is heating up now that CNNMoney has stepped into the market. The CNNMoney application is currently one of the top free Finance applications on the iTunes App Store, competing against companies such as Bloomberg, Associated Press, and The New York Times.
The CNNMoney application is a portal with a built in stock search engine, market index tracking tool, company and economic news, video highlights, and sharing feature. There is a tool called My Stocks to add the stocks that you want to track.
News about real estate, small business, technology, autos, jobs, and personal finance can be added to the homepage of the application. Additional headlines can be added from Fortune and Money Magazine as well.
Personally I believe that the application looks a bit generic and could use something to make it stand out from every other finance news application, but that is just my opinion. Some people are comfortable looking at generic finance news applications. The operating system required for the application is iPhone OS 2.1 or greater.
Skype for the iPhone was released back in April and now the application has been updated. The new version of the Skype iPhone application allows users to send SMS messages and check voicemail. One of the desired features that are lacking in the newest version of the application is push notifications.
“Skype iPhone is kinda useless with no push notifications so 1.1 still kinda useless. Why even include IM capability without it, what are people supposed to do – send me an email that we should skype chat?” wrote a commenter on the Skype Blog.
Push notifications are the ability to inform the iPhone there are incoming messages and incoming calls without the need for the application to be running at the time. AOL has successfully implemented this feature for their AOL Instant Messenger software on the iPhone.
“We’re concentrating on providing the very best experience possible on the iPhone. Your feedback is important – it’s why we’ve included SMS and voicemail in this release. But we can’t do everything at once, unfortunately,” wrote Skype blogger Peter Parkes.
When the iPhone 3GS phone launched about a week ago, over one million units were sold in the opening weekend. At one point, the iPhone 3GS was sold out in Apple retail stores across 44 of the U.S. states. When the device starts to sell out, Apple places a widget on their website. This same widget appeared on Apple’s website when the iPhone 3G started selling.
This year the widget is directly connected to Apple’s point-of-sale computers which updates the inventory availability once every hour, giving the widget higher accuracy. The white 16GB iPhone 3GS appears to be the most popular. In Apple’s 45 stores across California, about 28 of the stores are currently out of the white 16GB iPhone 3GS phones. The sales of the 3GS in the opening weekend was supposedly the biggest Apple has seen. It took 74 days to sell one million first generation iPhone devices when it launched a few years ago. And it took less than three days to reach over one million 3G S sales.
Apparently there is a way to enable tethering by modifying the code on the iPhone OS 3.0. If you are going to pursue this, I can only say it is at your own risk and I do not claim responsibility for what happens after. Read this whole post before getting started as there are two ways to get er’ done.
CrunchGear has a tutorial of how it works:
1. Download the carrier update from here.
2. Type this into the terminal:
- defaults write com.apple.iTunes
- carrier-testing -bool TRUE
After that start up iTunes and click the Restore button. Select the ipcc file in the disk image. After the restoration is complete, there will be an Internet Tethering option under the network section.
Another way to turn on tethering is by going to the link: http://help.benm.at/help.php on the phone browser. The steps on that website tell you how to set up and download tethering abilities through the phone.
As many of you are aware, Sirius-XM almost had to file for bankruptcy but was given a lifeline from Liberty Media. Shortly after resolving the financial issue, the company announced that they were going to make an iPhone application. Now we have found out additional information about their upcoming application.
The application will be for free, but will require a subscription to work. Current subscribers will have to pay $3/month for the application and non-subscribers have to pay $13 per month. This is quite hefty considering the other radio stations that are available for free (Pandora/Last.fm/Clear Channel/Shoutcast).
For those of you out there that are Sirius-XM satellite subscribers, do you think you’d shell out $3 per month for it?
In AT&T’s 4th quarter results, they have announced that 1.9 million iPhone 3Gs were activated. About 40% of these activations were new customers, indicating that about 760,000 people switched to AT&T just because of the iPhone. In the last half of 2008, AT&T activated about 4.3 million iPhones. iPhone customers also deliver the highest revenue per user for the telecommunications company.
