Chine Unicom scored quite a victory over the iPhone deal with Apple. With the heavy weight like China Mobile in the 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).
Steep pricing and lack of WiFi are currently keeping the iPhone sales below potential in China currently with the first week sales reported at around 30000 only.