China Mobile’s chairman says he has met with Apple CEO Steve Jobs to talk about an iPhone 4 model supporting the TD-LTE standard that China Mobile is obliged to deploy, reports “The Register” (http://macte.ch/AdAAN).
That would enable China Mobile to sell the handsets to its subscribers, rather than relying on the “grey imports” that have already supplied 7.44 million of them with iPhones, the article adds. Those iPhones can only use 2G connectivity, as China Mobile’s 3G network uses the locally-designed TD-SCDMA standard, which is incompatible with everything else.
The iPhone’s official distributer in China is Chain Unicom, which runs a more-familiar 3G technology (UMTS) in internationally recognized frequency bands.