Sinobyte: China and technology

The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.

Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:

- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;

- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;

- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;

- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.

- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.

- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.

- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.

- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.

The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."

I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.

It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.

Passing of the torch: here are my iPhone 3G and me in the eyes of my retired HTC Touch, now reduced to life as a Chinese dictionary.

(Credit: Graham Webster)

All year, I've been using an HTC Touch as my telephone. But now, having just moved back to the United States, I found it so hard to get a reasonable deal for service with this unlocked GSM smartphone that I decided there was little reason not to get an iPhone.

This was not an easy decision. I'm about to begin life as a graduate student, so money will be tight. I already had a pretty decent smartphone, which I'd bought in China because it was Windows Mobile and could run Pleco, the undisputed master of mobile Chinese-English dictionaries.

And I was nervous about the iPhone 3G, despite its superior aesthetics and preferable interface, having heard so much about performance problems. For a few reasons, I decided to go with iPhone anyway.

The primary reason is that AT&T and T-Mobile, the main GSM carriers in the United States, did not seem to want to give me a no-contract plan with a good data option. Both wanted a two-year contract just for opening the accounts, according to their Web sites. I had assumed one could just bring in a phone and go month to month.

The U.S. carriers seem to be using a tactic that Beijing-based tech industry consultant Mark Natkin said is the favored strategy of Chinese carriers to retain customers. Rather than lock the phones, which would be easily unlocked in Chinese electronics markets, providers are requiring contracts for decent services. Responding to my speculation on whether China Mobile iPhones will be unlocked, Natkin, who is managing director of Marbridge Consulting, explained:

Rather than locking phones, China's operators have been moving increasingly towards locking customers into a long-term contract that comes with a phone sourced by the operator. In San Francisco, a quick walk down Market Street from the AT&T Wireless store, you can get your mobile phone unlocked for $20 in about 10 minutes. So in China, where the labor is much cheaper, not many phones would stay locked unless the SIM card was fully embedded.

The fact that this tactic seemed to be in action in the U.S. made it only slightly more expensive for me to get an iPhone, so I went for it.

This could foretell a model for Apple to end its devotion to single carriers. If Apple were willing to let multiple mobile companies sell the iPhone and provide service for it in the United States, each company could sell them at a price like the $200 to $300 we see for the 3G and nail us with high-priced data plans. Especially if users wanted to use services like MobileMe's push e-mail feature (supposing it were to work), there could be specific, iPhone-only plans. Why can't this be done with multiple carriers?

This model wouldn't be new. The same phones have been available at multiple carriers for many years. They are sold at below-cost prices and the carriers make up for that with service contracts. What I want to know is:

• Why do we need to lock phones if we can lock users into contracts?

• If my phone is locked to your expensive service, why do you need to nail me with a contract?

Couldn't the industry get along with one or the other coercive tactic?

Unlocked, semi-legal iPhones have proliferated in China since Apple failed to make a deal with a Chinese carrier. Now that AT&T will offer an expensive solution for those wanting iPhones in the United States on different carriers, will the unlocked market be...unlocked?

For $699, the new 16GB iPhone 3G will be available to non-AT&T customers in the United States. As I've reported, China Mobile and Apple are now in talks that are more likely to bear fruit. This post is based on a few questions I really can't answer. Let's have them.

1. Will truly unlocked iPhones still be available in China? I put a lot of faith in the efforts of crackers to defeat whatever Apple comes up with, but I would personally be wary of getting an unlocked iPhone that might not accept upgrades, mostly because iPhone software needs upgrades. For example, I've been baffled--while using friends' phones--by the apparent impossibility of sending a vCard from one address book to another person using iPhone's mail application.
2. If the China Mobile-Apple deal goes through, is it possible that "legitimate" iPhones will be locked to China Mobile and useless in other countries? Would top-market Chinese users, who are used to switching SIM cards at will and picking up multiple SIMs at home and in other countries (as well as in Hong Kong), stand for this? I don't know the technology well enough to answer this one.
3. Does Apple sell unlocked iPhones anywhere on Earth? If so, I want one.
4. And since I'm not an expert in cell phone fees, but know AT&T has raised prices for iPhone 3G service plans (and presumably for the large cost in rolling out the 3G network), is it worth $400 to get out of its clutches over two years and take on a reasonable plan with another GSM carrier in the United States? If you divide $400 by 24 months, a person would only need to find a plan that is $17/month cheaper. That doesn't seem absurd, given the $70/month plus SMS cost of the starting AT&T plan.
5. And here's one for U.S. users. If you could buy a phone for much cheaper that was unlocked, but had to be semi-legally or illegally brought from China, would that scare off people concerned about product quality?

I'm going to e-mail one or two experts to see if I can get these questions answered, but in the meantime, feel free to speak up.

After talks broke down earlier this year between Apple and China Mobile over the (non-pirated) introduction of the iPhone, Apple's concession to non-U.S. carriers that they don't need to share revenue has apparently restored progress with the world's largest carrier.

This comes as China's government reports mobile accounts are nearing the 600 million mark. China Mobile alone has more than 400 million accounts. These numbers don't mean there are that many people with cell phones, however. I and many others have multiple SIM cards. I use one for visiting friends, but others use second cards, which can be purchased for under 10 USD, to keep various types of calls separate.

From AFP:

China Mobile said Friday the main obstacle keeping iPhone out of the world's largest mobile phone market had been cleared now that Apple has dropped its revenue-sharing demands.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said this week he would like to see the device introduced in China later this year, and a senior China mobile executive confirmed the two companies were back in talks.

"We've broken through the biggest obstacle and we are negotiating at the working level," Gao Songge, deputy director of China Mobile's general department, told AFP.

Now if only the U.S. iPhone would allow choice of carrier...

Language Log notes that Apple's Dictionary program (v. 1.02 running in Tiger) gave an interesting pronunciation for "Myanmar:" It's pronounced "Burma."

(Credit: Language Log)

I would tend to think this is an accident, but it's an interesting one. I've edited articles that required the country to be called Burma for political reasons and others that follow the international convention of calling it Myanmar. Either way, if I were manufacturing this sort of thing I might flag all the controversial geographical terms for careful review.

Another reason it is probably an accident (and not someone's intentional statement) is that it only appears this way in one phonetic system. According to TidBits, a Mac blog that apparently first reported this, "Dictionary has three different options for displaying the pronunciation key, which you can select in the Preferences window: U.S. English (Diacritical), U.S. English (IPA), and British English (IPA). It turns out that only the two IPA (international phonetic alphabet) choices show the pronunciation of "Burma"; the U.S. English (Diacritical) pronunciation is correct."

Now, sitting as I am just a couple of kilometers from North Korea in Dandong, Liaoning Province, China, the question arises: Is it North Korea or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? China or the People's Republic of China? Am I American, U.S. American, "from the United States," or just a foreigner? Apple's dictionary has no help for me there.

The largest mobile operator in China has broken off talks with Apple over the iPhone, with one executive saying Apple wanted to share too much revenue.

From the Financial Times:

Chinese media on Monday quoted Gao Nianshu, general manager of China Mobile's data department, saying that Apple had given the impression it wanted to control the value chain and had pushed for up to 30 percent of revenues generated by locally sold iPhones.

"Of course we could not agree," Mr. Gao told a gathering of local MBA students, according to the Sina Web site. China Mobile also doubted Apple's prowess in communications technology, it quoted him as saying.

China Mobile is a topic for another day; as of November, it serves more than 360 million of the 522 million mobile users in China. The second-largest mobile company here, China Unicom, did not comment on whether it plans to put the iPhone out there.

Meanwhile, unlocked phones are still pouring into the market. I'm seeing more and more of them in the hands of rich folks, Chinese and foreign alike, and there are plenty on sale at electronics markets. Perhaps the person behind the last blip I saw about the iPhone in China was overexcited or full of it, but with the black/gray market so healthy, both China Mobile and Apple will probably not wait long to put a deal together and take their share.

The iPhone is already in China: I saw one for sale today, and a friend really should call me more often from one. But Marbridge Daily is onto a story in the Southern Metropolitan News reporting that the iPhone will be on sale in China by the second quarter of 2008.

I'm not able to find the original article right now, but Marbridge's blurb says the source is Lin Ronghui, vice president of iTell. Lin apparently said the phone will be selling for about RMB 4,000, considerably less than the unlocked street prices I've seen, and will be sold in cooperation with local mobile companies.

Much has been made of the possibility that the iPhone will make it to China's market. Even though it's already here, users of illicitly unlocked phones risk bricking their phones if they download software updates from Apple.

Perhaps we should expect an official announcement sometime soon...