<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"China, the world's most populous country has been iPhone-less for far too long, and now one of China's biggest mobile operators, Unicom, is poised to fix this. According to Shanghai Securities News, which quoted unnamed sources, Unicom got a three year deal to be the sole supplier of iPhones in China.\nThe same source has some details about the deal. Apparently, Unicom has agreed to let Apple pre-install the App Store on the iPhone, which gave it the upper hand over China Mobile, which wouldn't accept this condition from Apple. If the deal goes through, Unicom should start selling iPhones at the end of September, at a price of up to 440 dollars, and has guaranteed to sell two million units a year. It would only be a modest beginning for Apple, which sold 5.2 million iPhones in the last fiscal quarter, but China's huge market (which had 687 million mobile phone users in May) is perhaps the most important one for Apple in the long run. \nThe deal is not yet done, however. As a Unicom spokesman put it, \"We have made progress but there are still some problems to be resolved. Both sides have their own timeframe for an agreement but essentially it depends on the practical progress of the negotiations.\"\nIf the iPhone finally comes to China, it will be a huge booster for Apple, but it will also raise a number of interesting questions. How will China's strict censorship laws reflect on the iPhone and its myriad of applications? Apple already has double standards when it comes to iPhone apps; in China, it might be forced to make it triple."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/07/28/iphone-china-2/>