Three-year agreement kicks off this side of Christmas, but pricing details still unknown.
China Unicom has officially announced a three-year agreement with Apple to sell its iPhone in China, confirming the speculation that's been swirling for the last few weeks.
Selected details have been made public, including the fact that the deal does not include revenue sharing aspects, and that the iPhone's Wi-Fi connection will be disabled.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China Unicom boss Chang Xiaobing said two versions of the iPhone will go on sale in China in the fourth quarter of this year.
The operator will subsidise the price of the handsets, but did not say how much, or indeed give any indication of the likely pricing. iPhone will take advantage of China Unicom's new 3G network, which will be launched at the end of September in 285 cities in China.
There are implications for mobile entertainment firms. No Wi-Fi means that applications will either need to be downloaded over the mobile network, or sideloaded from PCs.
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Elsewhere in the world, only apps under 10MB in size can be downloaded over the air. If this is true in China too, then anything larger - which includes a lot of the major iPhone games - will have to be sideloaded.
That will mean the launch of Apple's App Store in mainland China, presumably.
Mobile games firm Artificial Life has already welcomed the news, saying it's already translating all its iPhone games into simplified Chinese, while developing new games and lifestyle apps for the Chinese market too.
"We expect the iPhone to be successful in China especially due to the many free downloads available on the device," says CEO Eberhard Schoneburg.
"With our production center in Hong Kong we are already active in China and are especially aware of the Chinese cultural preferences and customisation needs."
