“The iPhone 5 is off to a strong start at its latest carrier,” Lance Whitney reports for CNET.
“After kicking off preorders for the new phone early yesterday, China Unicom took in more than 100,000 online reservations by 4 p.m. local time, Chinese news site Sina Tech said today,” Whitney reports. “China’s second largest carrier will officially launch the iPhone 5 on December 14.”
“China Unicom joins China Telecom as the second Chinese carrier to sell the iPhone 5,” Whitney reports. “Starting this month, the iPhone 5, iPad Mini, and fourth-generation iPad will be available in China through Apple’s online and physical stores and various Apple resellers. By the end of 2012, the new iPhone will be available in 100 different countries.”
Read more in the full article here.
Everything below a million is a non-story. This is not Apple circa 1998…
Is that supposed to be impressive? There ARE nearly 1.5 BILLION of them. It’d be like selling 25,000 pre-orders of something in the US…and the Surface did etter than that and everyone knows that product sucks…
“them”?
China Unicom is about the size of Verizon or AT&T, about 100M, and only about 1/3rd, 35M, are on postpaid subscriptions. Those are your primary customers to sell to. Now, redo your math.
Your logic might work if you’re making the argument that when the iPhone was released in the US existing AT&T customers and ONLY EXISTING AT&T customers could get one. But, I know at least ONE person who switched carriers to get one 😉
Not such big deal… Chinese are quite many folks and 100000 of them is quite few.
Ok, I assume that people in China are using Windows PCs to order products on line. So, 100,000 people in China were willing to take the risk to order an iPhone on line. Very gutsy. I assume the others will get them at the local stores where it is safer. Soon, they can buy others stuff using their iPhones and iPads. Should be a little safer. However, it is still in hacker heaven also known as China.