Thousands of Chinese Apple fans lined up outside one of Apple's new retail stores in order to get their hands on the iPhone 4 which went on sale Saturday morning.
Covering the launch of the iPhone 4, Michael Kan writes that thousands of Chinese Apple fans lined up outside one of Apple’s new retail stores in order to get their hands on the new iPhone 4 which went on sale Saturday morning.
The launch of the iPhone 4 in China appears to have attracted more customers than Apple’s release of its previous iPhone. Apple would offer no figures, but China Unicom, the mobile carrier for the device, has reported that 50,000 users signed up for an iPhone 4 on the first day of pre-orders. This beats the initial 5,000 devices that were sold through China Unicom in the first few days after the iPhone 3GS and 3G went on sale in China last year.
To be fair, Chinese regulations at the time prevented previous iterations of the iPhone from being sold with Wi-Fi enabled. Moreover, the delay in getting the iPhone into China resulted in a booming market for counterfeit and imported iPhones. That being the case, by the time the iPhone went on sale in China last year, many folks who could afford an iPhone already owned one.
In any event, the iPhone 4 launch in China is just the latest in Apple’s continued international iPhone rollout. Other countries where the iPhone 4 recently launched, or will launch soon, include Turkey, Croatia, Thailand, Israel, the UAE, and Russia.
And below is video footage of an Apple store in the Xidan Joy City shopping center in Beijing as it opens up for business. Incidentally, the 16GB iPhone 4 in China runs at about $744 while the 32GB model goes for $893.
