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Apple ChiPhone set for July?

A few tantalizing tidbits surfaced today indicating that the iPhone's long-awaited entry into the Chinese market will occur next month and that the ChiPhone will include three communications methods: "EDGE (enhanced data rates for GSM evolution), 3G and China's related standards." The report comes from the China Economic News …

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Anonymous Coward
Go

Go! China go!

Meanwhile back in the UK BT contemplates whether the national average broadband connection transfer rate should be 2.0 or 2.4 Mb/s?

Michael Jennings

One bumps into a lot of German engineers in Shanghai.

>Now, TD-SCDMA is a full-on Chinese standard

Yes, it has been developed as a partnership between the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Datang and the very Chinese Siemens AG.

TD-SCDMA is derived from a technology that the Germans attempted to sell as an air interface for UMTS, but which lost out to the Japanese and the Nordics, who went for W-CDMA. The Chinese are certainly paying a lot less to Western companies in royalties than they would be using W-CDMA, but just how much of the technology of TD-SCDMA is actually Chinese is debatable, I think.

Ironfrost

How about WAPI?

The other possible "Chinese related standard" (especially because they're saying "3G and...") is WAPI, the Chinese competitor to 802.11i that got rejected by ISO. Don't laugh, it's still around, and it's the reason why WiFi is stripped out of the Chinese versions of most handsets. The government won't issue a Network Access Certificate (the handset model license that allows it to be sold legally) for a WiFi-capable phone unless it supports WAPI. Perhaps Apple has adopted WAPI as the price of allowing WiFi in the iPhone? I don't think it's all that much less likely than them using TD-SCDMA.

Just baseless speculation, is all.

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