China Unicom sold only 5000 iPhones in China on launch day in October but it appears that sales are gaining momentum, now topping 100,000.
Although the number is improving, comparatively the original iPhone sold over 1 million in its first 3 months in the US, and exclusive carrier AT&T has under half the mobile subscribers that Unicom has. The iPhone 3GS sold over one million units in its first weekend this year.
Unicom also announced it hopes to add over 1 million 3G users every month, and the iPhone is part of that goal. Additionally, Unicom has been gaining users from China’ gray market. Those that purchased iPhones from Hong Kong and abroad are activating the phones through Unicom, as a way to use to the 3G wireless data.
Result for: china
According to new figures from TorrentFreak, uTorrent is no longer the most used torrent client in the world, being surpassed by the Chinese client “Thunder.” The data was collected from 357 million unique peer IDs from all over the world.
About 30 percent of all tracker connections come from China, with the U.S. as a distant runner up at 8 percent.
Thunder/Xunlei has taken the lead from uTorrent and the stats were taken from OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Denis Stalker trackers. Vuze remains close in third place.
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Result for: china
At the Mobile Asia Congress event this week, China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou said his company is still in talks with Apple over bringing the iPhone smartphone to the nation, despite Apple’s recent deal with China Unicom.
“China Mobile has continued negotiations with Apple to introduce the iPhone on China Mobile’s network,” he added. The China Unicom deal is non-exclusive.
The talks, which began in 2007 with the original iPhone model, are still held up by a few snags, likely feature-set and pricing. However, “we really are still in talks with Apple. In our negotiations in the past, we insisted on sticking to our conditions. We are still very sincere about completing this negotiation.”
The Wi-Fi-crippled and overpriced version available from Unicom has seen underwhelming sales, with some reports placing sales at just 5000 in the first week. In comparison, the iPhone 3GS sold 1 million units in its first weekend in the US.
