The Other Real News of China Unicom Eunuch(Wi-Fi less) iPhone: China Unicom Owned App Store

Submitted by kai on Fri, 2009-08-28 15:53. ::

Today, so much coverage has been focusing on the official announcement of iPhone and China Unicom deal to bring iPhone to China at the end of September. The first version of iPhone in China is confirmed not to have Wi-Fi but WAPI(A China home-grown wireless standard). China Unicom has denied about pre-ordering 5 million iPhones for 10 billion RMB(14.7 billion US dollars) and said the number of iPhones to be ordered depending on the market demand. The rumored price for a 8GB iPhone is 2999RMB with a pre-purchase of 3000RMB phone service credit.

You can see demo videos of iPhone 3GS Chinese version. The notable features are threaded MMS conversation, China Unicom newspaper portal, voice-activated calling, voice commands(eg: control music player etc.) in Chinese & English, integrated mapping with Google Maps. I guess Google search will be the default search on Safari. Since Google has lost the search engine war to Baidu on desktop, the next battle field will be definitely on mobile.

The real news is that China Unicom is developing its own App Store. It has been working with 3rd-party companies in China to develop iPhone applications for China. Apple itself is also working with developers to develop Chinese apps for its app store. China Unicom's app store will not only support iPhone, but other platforms like Android. This is just like what China Mobile has done with its Mobile Market: support multiple platforms including Android. You can read more on how China Mobile has stumbled out of gate with its app store offering.

This is the first time that a carrier has its own app store for iPhones. Before you crying foul of Apple giving up too much and China Unicom taking too much control, it's actually crucial for App Store to succeed in China as I discussed in my older blog post

integrated billing with carrier instead of forcing a user to have a credit card to use iTunes app store
prepaid credit on phone bill
need to get around the app download size limit over carrier's network

Finally, here's the poll result on whether Chinese users will buy iPhone in China