Apple finally enters the world’s biggest mobile market: China

mobilecrunch.com

14 points·peter123··4 comments

Everyone always gets stars in their eyes about China, don't believe the hype. Few foreign companies actually do well. Ask Blizzard for instance how it's going for them with WoW. If you're not Chinese you will be manipulated and milked for what you're worth.

China Unicom is also a distant second place in subscriber numbers to China Mobile (130M vs 497M). Add to that that the high price (1.5 months of a typical salary for a Beijing resident) and that this is available only on a term contract (~60% of subscribers in China are pay as you go and most could not change to a contract even if they wanted) and you probably have a potential market about the size of Canada for Apple.

And WIFI disabled? WTF? Everywhere in China has free WIFI and many phones have it. Who's going to want it with that restriction?

And they already have a bazillion really awesome mobile phones too. The iPhone is nice, but it is actually behind many phones in Asia...

I am just curious to see the ones that are better than the iPhone. Care to post any links to them?

i work for a company where we hire a lot of young chinese guys who come to the US for about 3 months, get trained, and then go back to china to do work. these guys always buy used iphones from craigslist to take back to china because they can buy it at a much cheaper price, unlock it, and then sell it for a profit. ~$350 does sound a little steep, but i think they pay a much higher price now if they want one.

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