iPhone News Updated

China ignores Apple’s Iphone

AS WE HAD PREDICTED, the Chinese are telling Jobs’ Mob where to stuff its Iphone.

China Unicom has sold less than 100,000 Iphones since it launched the country’s first legitimate sales of the handset at the end of October.

The outfit knew it was going to be bad. After a sales and marketing campaign on the first day it sold only 5,000 Iphones in the first few days after launch.

While sales have picked up a little, they are not even close to what was optimistically predicted. Unicom apparently bought five million of the things. We hope it can get its money back.

It had been expected by the Apple press that Jobs’ Mob would sail into China and everyone would buy one. Realising that it could not compete with such beauty the Communist party would resign and hold free elections, and the Middle Kingdom would settle down into a “think different” utopia where everyone would have free Ipods.

In fact the Chinese turned out to be the sort of buyer that Apple hates - thrifty and very discerning. The Iphone was peddled with some important features lopped off because Steve Jobs did not want to use the Chinese WiFi standards. This meant that if users wanted to buy any software they would have to pay a fortune for it to be downloaded. The locked gadget came out more expensive than the unlocked one and actually did less. If the Chinese bought the same gadget in Hong Kong they could get it for $200 less.

Jobs’ Mob did better in South Korea where it received more than 60,000 pre-orders for the Iphone before it even launched retail sales late last month.

China Unicom gave no other details on its Iphone sales volume but called the handset a “great success”, although it also said that on launch day when it clearly was not.

[Thanks: http://www.theinquirer.ne]

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