Neuter Me This: iPhone China Rumor
Posted on September 25, 2008
Filed Under China Business, Mobile, Wireless Networks |
The South China Morning Post reports:
China Mobile is expected to offer Apple’s iPhone on the mainland but the 3G and Wi-fi network functions will be disabled as Beijing has not yet approved handsets with these features, according to Daiwa Institute of Research.
…Daiwa analyst Calvin Huang yesterday said Taiwan Hon Hai Precision Industry, which is responsible for assembling iPhone products for Apple, is waiting for verification from the mainland to ship the phone without 3G and Wi-fi internet functions.
Wi-fi enables users to connect to a wireless internet network.
IPhone also has a built-in 3G function based on Europe’s WCDMA standard.
“It could be easier for Apple to disable several features in the phone to gain access to the mainland market, rather than to have a whole new product,” said Mr Wong.
From a technical standpoint, it’s getting TD-SCDMA chips in the iPhone that really matters. It wouldn’t serve Apple or China Mobile to offer the new iPhone without 3G. Visiting the online Apple store over a GSM connection is rather pointless.
The silly prohibition against WiFi is a relic of telecoms paranoia over VOIP. Maybe if they ship with the chip disabled it will give those iPhone crackers at the computer malls something to do.
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3 Responses to “Neuter Me This: iPhone China Rumor”
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I wonder if they’re really likely to just disable the WiFi without making any changes to the hardware. If it was possible to get that past the regulators (and assuming it makes financial sense), Nokia, HTC and the rest would already be doing it instead of providing separate models to the Chinese market.
Great point. The only difference I can think of with Nokia et al and Apple is the economy of scale for production. Because those companies make so many different kinds of phones the decision to re-engineer a particular model isn’t that big of a deal.
Do you think that putting TD-SCDMA chips in an iPhone is sufficiently different than the existing WCDMA model that they’d have to re-jigger the whole thing? If that’s the case I would guess it’s not that big of a deal to drop the WiFi hardware.
A TD iPhone would definitely be very different to the WCDMA one, but I don’t think that anyone expects that to happen any time soon, at least in the short term - the technology is still so far behind in terms of stability, power consumption etc, and the handsets on the market all have serious problems. I don’t think Apple would want to associate its brand with that sort of thing; this is the company that didn’t even put WCDMA in the first generation iPhone because it used too much power.