Hasta La Gadget!

Is China getting its own legal iPhone in the near future? It would seem so. The State Radio Regulatory Commission (the country’s equivalent to our FCC) has listed a handset manufactured by Apple Inc. with a May 7th, 2009 approval date.

According to Engadget, the certificate, which appears to be for the iPhone 3G, expires in five years.

Well, at least some of the mystery is solved. If a machine translated source is to be believed — not to mention a healthy gathering of screengrabs — Philips’ elusive V808 smartphone will be a China Mobile exclusive. As with other Android-based phones on the operator, it’ll be the reworked OPhone OS handling the dirty work, which basically means a carrier-customized app market and a few other tweaks that seem to be frowned upon in the Chinese community. We’re also told that the phone will lack support for 3G, WiFi and multitouch, leaving us grieved, lugubrious and lachrymose. C’mon guys — why hamstring a good thing?

[Via Cloned In China]

Filed under: Cellphones

Philips V808 smartphone to run Android-based OPhone OS on China Mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is it really happening? Is the world’s most thickly settled nation finally getting the iPhone in earnest? If a bold (albeit woolly) report from China’s own national news agency is to be believed, China Unicom has just locked down a deal that’ll grant it exclusive rights to sell Apple’s heralded smartphone in mainland China for three whole years. Unfortunately, most of the nitty-gritty details are absent, but we are led to believe that this will be the first-ever iPhone sold with any branding at all outside of logos splashed on at Cupertino. The “Wo” icon you see just below the speaker signifies that this here device is ready to rock on the carrier’s 3G network, though we still can’t say with any amount of certainty if said image is fully legitimate. We’re also waiting to hear whether it’ll be the iPhone 3G or 3GS (or both) that’s sold, and we’re particular curious as to whether or not these handsets will include WiFi modules.

In related news, it does sound as if China Unicom bent over backwards a bit to make this all come together, with the article stating that it signed on to move between one and two million units per year regardless of how many consumers actually show up to buy one. If you’ll recall, an eerily similar agreement has Russian operators in a world of financial hurt, but we get the feeling the reception in China will be quite a bit warmer. At any rate, it’s noted that Unicom will be snapping up the devices from Apple at a cost of around 3,000 Chinese yuan apiece ($439), with end users being asked to pay an undisclosed lesser amount on contract. If all goes well, the units could hit Chinese shops as early as September, though only time will tell how everything shakes out. Oh, and considering that Apple can hardly keep up with iPhone 3GS demand as it is, we suspect it’ll want to wait a few months anyway before stressing its supply channels further.

Update: A China Unicom spokeswoman has now been quoted as saying that “we have made progress but there are still some problems to be resolved.” Really? Another round of this?

Filed under: Cellphones

China Unicom finally bringing iPhone to world’s most populous country? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The NYT has more on the death of Sun Danyong, the Foxconn worker who apparently committed suicide after an iPhone prototype went missing. As compensation, his family has been paid about $44,000, and his girlfriend received an Apple laptop.

Sun apparently was given not just one, but 16 prototype iPhones on July 9 or 10 to deliver to R&D, and he reported one missing three days later. He committed suicide early in the morning on July 16, after allegedly suffering through brutal interrogations.

Foxconn’s China general manager James Lee told the NYT that Sun had a history of disappearing products: “Several times he had some products missing, then he got them back,” and that they “don’t know who took the product, but it was at his stop.”

The NYT closes with an episode that again shows the kind of people Sun had to deal with: Not long after Sun’s father finished telling journalists Foxconn treated the family well, a security guard with two men in Foxconn shirts appeared and threatened to beat up a journalist’s translator if they kept asking the family questions. Foxconn swears the guard wasn’t one of their guys.

I’m sure he had nothing to do with Foxconn, and was just some dude who asked to tag along with the guys in Foxconn shirts. You know, for fun. [NYT]

Chinese newspapers have been piecing together Foxconn worker Sun Danyong’s final hours, and claim to have recovered his final text message to his girlfriend, sent two hours before he died. It’s clear something horrible was happening to him:

“My dear, I’m sorry, go back home tomorrow, something has happened to me, please don’t tell my family, don’t contact me, this is the first time that I have ever begged you, please agree to that! I am so sorry!”

And in what is reportedly his final online chat—supposedly verified as authentic—Sun tells a friend he never stole the phone, and thinks it was swiped. He also again implies that he was tortured, or at least forcefully detained and interrogated with physical force, clearly contradicting what Foxconn’s security chief told a Chinese paper:

“Even at a police station, the law says force must never be used, much less in a corporate office. I was just a suspect, my dear head of security, so what reason and right do you have to confine me and use force?

If Foxconn is directly involved in his death, it and all of its executives could go bankrupt a million times over and that would still not even come to close to justice for Sun Danyong. [The New Yorker]