Nearly a year after the iPhone’s introduction in China, Apple’s telecom partner in the Asian giant will begin offering a Wi-Fi version. China Unicom announced it will begin selling Monday the 8GB iPhone 3GS with Wi-Fi.
The 16- and 32-gigabyte non-Wi-Fi versions of the 3GS will also still be for sale.
Although Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS to China in October 2009, it wasn’t until July of this year the government approved a Wi-Fi version. When the 3GS first entered the country, Chinese regulators banned sale of a Wi-Fi version hoping Apple would adopt the homegrown WAPI alternative.
The lack of Wi-Fi may have damped early interest in the 3GS. China Unicom sold only 5,000 handsets in the first four days. Although sales eventually increased – reaching 100,000 handsets sold in December – the iPhone still competed with the popular ‘gray market’ handsets which offered Wi-Fi.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
