Chine Unicom scored quite a victory over the iPhone deal with Apple. With the heavy weight like China Mobile in picture which a year back had 634 million subscribers alone, China Unicom sure has a sizzler with the iPhone 3GS on sale exclusively in China at the moment. Apparently a dispute over the App Store revenues proved to be a deal breaker between China Mobile and Apple. However there is now a confirmation from China Mobile that they are still in talks with Apple and we can hope for the iPhone coming to their mass customer base sometime in the future. For the moment we hear that the iPhone 3GS is selling well in the gray markets in China (just like the 2G did).

We really are still in talks with Apple… In our negotiations in the past, we insisted on sticking to our conditions.  We are still very sincere about completing this negotiation. – Wang Jianzhou, Chairman China Mobile

Steep pricing and lack of WiFi is currently keeping the iPhone sales below potential in China currently with the first week sales reported at around 30000 only.