China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou said he will "keep all options open" on the introduction of the iPhone in China, Paul Midler reports.
In January, a China Mobile executive announced that talks had broken off over Apple's desire for control. Now, Wang says talks have not "officially" begun.
China Mobile is the largest mobile provider in China, a market that is projected to reach $2.8 billion by 2010, and urban China is by no means a no-iPhone zone. Apple develops more advanced locking techniques at roughly the same rate unlocking techniques make their debut in electronics markets worldwide.
Street prices for imported and unlocked iPhones vary with the news about any official sales in China. After January's news of the breakdown in China Mobile talks, prices spiked. But I suspect the gray market will not die even if China Mobile and Apple make a deal.
Apple products, even though they are made in China (my MacBook was shipped direct from Suzhou, near Shanghai), tend to be more expensive here. I overheard a Chinese couple in the Bainaohui electronics market at Chaoyangmen yesterday getting ready to buy a MacBook Air for about $2,700 (compared with about $1,800 in the United States). In a less extreme example a few weeks ago, the Beijing price at an authorized dealer for my friend's new MacBook was about $300 higher than in the United States or even Hong Kong.
No doubt, if the higher prices continue to dominate, people will keep asking friends to pick up iPhones in the United States or elsewhere to be unlocked here.
The Reuters article that Midler links to reminds us that iPhone talks are under way with NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Maybe the trip for gray market phones won't be as far...
It's hardly surprising that China Mobile can figure out about where its subscribers are when the phone is on (or when the battery's in). This sort of technology is standard in developed mobile networks, and it's fueling a wave of business innovation and "locative technology."
So why was it so shocking to an AFP reporter when China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou told an audience at the World Economic Forum that "we know who you are, but also where you are"? Will at Imagethief has already made the alarmist journalism argument, so I'll leave that to him. (The AFP headline ran under the unnecessary headline, "China's mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool?")
What struck me was U.S. Rep. Ed Markey's (D-Mass.) surprised reaction. Markey said the news was "bone chilling" and told AFP, "I have my eyebrows arched so high they're hitting the ceiling."
I just doubt this really could have been shocking to Markey, who is perhaps the U.S. Congress' most prominent name on telecommunications policy. Along with liberal members of the FCC board, he's been a friend to the "net neutrality" movement, and he was received warmly last year in Memphis at Free Press' National Conference on Media Reform.
Anecdotally, I would say the assumption among people involved with media and politics in Beijing is that it is trivially easy for the government to tap cell phones and gather location data based on which tower your phone is in touch with. E-mail also is often assumed not to be secure. Markey must know the U.S. government can do this too, especially in light of the illegal wiretaps by the Bush administration. (The secret monitoring of U.S. citizens would actually have been legal if they had bothered to get their warrants rubber-stamped by a secret court, so don't think due process is a defense in the United States.)
If Markey was really shocked, he was ignorant. If he was faking it, he was taking part in China alarmism on an issue that is news to practically no one in China. This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of government surveillance, but no one is surprised that it's a fact. I wish U.S. politicians wouldn't be so willing to make such statements about China just to grab the spotlight when journalists are unnecessarily aroused.
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