It’s been rumored and rumbled for some time now, but we finally have official word from on high. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, in the news conference following their mostly positive quarterly and fiscal year report, China Telecom Chairman and CEO Wang Xiaochu announced that his network will be picking up BlackBerry devices in May and the Palm Pre in July.

Presumably at this point they will be Pre Plus phones (no word on the Pixi headed to China), but what restrictions China’s government will place on the phones remains to be seen. China Telecom is the country’s third largest provider, and the largest CDMA in China. Looking back at the iPhone launch, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Wi-Fi disabled on or missing from the Pre when it reaches China’s shores. Adding devices from Palm and Research in Motion is part of China Telecom’s strategy to compete with China Unicom, which recently launched the iPhone in China. The smartphone launches are also behind a drive to make China Unicom’s mobile division profitable, currently the business is sustained by landline phone and broadband communications.

China Telecom has been reported to be in talks with Palm since August of 2009, so it’s nice to finally get some official word on the Chinese launch of webOS.

Thanks to mikeh20 for the tip!

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Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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It’s a small blurb in a Reuters article mainly about BlackBerries in China, but here’s the important part for us:

"China Telecom aims to sell BlackBerry handsets and Palm smartphones in China by early next year, as it tries to gain share from its two larger mobile telecom rivals, a source familiar with the situation said on Monday."

China Telecom is China’s smallest major cellular network (though the largest Chinese CDMA network), trailing behind rivals China Unicom and China Mobile. China Unicom recently launch the iPhone in China, though its high price has apparently limited the iPhone’s success. China Mobile, on the other hand, will be launching Dell’s new smartphone offering, the Android-running Dell Mini 3i.

This also is not the first time we’ve heard of China Telecom pursuing Palm. It was reported back in August that the carrier was in talks to carry Palm devices.

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It is one sentence in a Financial Times article about Chinese telecoms, but it says a lot:

“And China Telecom is planning to offer the Palm to its subscribers.”

Presumably, ‘the Palm’ means the Palm Pre. It works out well for China Telecom, as they are the country’s largest CDMA carrier and are in the process of rolling out an EV-DO network, while competitor China Unicom looks likely to score Apple’s iPhone. Getting the Pre in China would be a win for Palm, as adding the nation of 1.33 billion to distribution channels would increase Palm’s addressable market by nearly 150% over currently announced partnerships (with approximately 540 million possible customers in markets covered by Sprint, Bell Mobility, and O2/Telefonica). Of course, there’s no telling what sort of government requirements Palm may have to meet in adjusting the Pre such that it will be allowed to be sold in China, so it may be a while.

[via: Engadget]

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