The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has finally reached an agreement with China Mobile to carry the iPhone. China Mobile is currently the world’s largest mobile carrier with well over 700 million subscribers. Yesterday a subsidiary of the carrier started taking pre-orders for the smartphone, though the page was quickly pulled from its website.
[tweet https://twitter.com/MarketWatch/status/408416053140946945 align=’center’]
In September the advertisment above leaked to the media. The image is a promotion for the iPhone 5s and 5c running on China Mobile’s network. The Chinese government, which controls China Mobile, confirmed that the phone would be available on December 18th last month, although neither Apple nor China Mobile would actually confirm the rumor.
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We all knew it was coming, but it’s welcome news nonetheless.
The biggest holdup for getting the iPhone on China Mobile is the fact China Mobile uses two peculiar digital cellular standards, TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE. It’s possible that the iPhone 5C and 5S uses a cellphone radio chip compatible with TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE, but that capability was unknown until now.
Watch iPhone sales go through the roof as a large fraction of China Mobile’s 750 million user base flock to the new iPhone models.
Don’t worry. The iPhone LTE module fully supports those two standards as someone is using the two TD networks on their iPhone 5S now.
A sales boost could be expected in China.
If AAPL isn’t in the high 600’s by noon tomorrow I would be surprised.