No iPhone for you, China

Over the last few days, rumors have swirled about an iPhone con­tract with China Mobile or another major Chi­nese car­rier. Here’s one exam­ple of these blogged rumors, from into­Mo­bile. Here’s a breath­less arti­cle from IDG.

All of these rumors has affected Apple and China Mobile stock prices, of course. The iPhone­makes a lot of sense in Asian mar­ket because the phone has no hard­ware key­board. It seems easy to sup­port spe­cific lan­guages with the on-screen keyboard.

Accord­ing to ZDNet, a Chi­nese iPhone deal won’t hap­pen any time soon, even though China Mobile has 350 mil­lion cus­tomers.

Stick to the busi­ness model

Apple wants a piece of the voice and data rev­enue, iTunes Store sup­port, and locked SIM cards in the phones. But China Mobile does not want a rev­enue part­ner, the iTunes store is not pop­u­lar in China, and CM’s phones use unlocked SIM cards. It’s always inter­est­ing when the key suc­cess fac­tors do not come together.

China Uni­com doesn’t sup­port GSM, so they’re out of the pic­ture. The iPhone is a GSM device, partly because AT&T wanted the exclu­sive US con­tract, but mostly because the Euro­pean mobile car­ri­ers use GSM.

iPhones are made in China

Google’s Android plat­form may be more Chi­nese car­ri­ers, espe­cially if Chi­nese device man­u­fac­tur­ers and the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment sup­port the platform.

Yahoo’s recent prob­lems in the US Con­gress are a good les­son for Apple and Google. The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment will go to great lengths to mon­i­tor and con­trol the Inter­net in their coun­try, but that gov­ern­ment needs will­ing part­ners to get the work done. Here’s a good dis­cus­sion of Chi­nese mon­i­tor­ing prac­tices in Wired.

Tagged as: at&t, China, Europe, Google, government, GSM, Internet, key-success-factors, ksf, mobile, monitoring, privacy, security, usability