Unicom has agreed to buy iPhones from Apple for 3,000 yuan each, the Shanghai Securities News quoted sources as saying.

The mobile firm will guarantee total revenue of at least 5 billion yuan a year for Apple after committing to buy one to two million phones annually.

The deal does not require Unicom to share any of the revenue it generates from mobile-data charges with Apple, reports said.

Merrill Lynch analyst Cynthia Meng believes Unicom will introduce the 16-gigabyte version of the iPhone 3GS in September or October, potentially at an “affordable mid-range” price below 3,000 yuan for customers who commit to a contract.

Unicom could launch the 32-gigabyte version of the iPhone 3GS by the end of the year, she said.

Source : Konaxis

According to a report on Sina.com, staff from a business hall at Heilongjiang Unicom say the short message service is provided by a franchiser of Heilongjiang Unicom, so it can not be cancelled at Heilongjiang Unicom’s business hall. However users can ask for cancellation of the service by sending a short message, but in this case they need to pay RMB0.1 as an information fee when cancelling the nuisance service.

As the short message service is started without users’ subscriptions, it is deemed to be spam and unwanted. Heilongjiang Unicom’s service center says that users can cancel the service in two ways. One is to send a short message to cancel for which they need to pay RMB0.1 as information fee, and the other is to cancel it through the manual service counter of Heilongjiang Unicom, which is free but the cancellation won’t be valid until 24 hours later. It seems like a Kafka nightmare where users are stung every where they turn.

Dong Hongyang, a researcher from Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, is cited as saying that it is unreasonable for the mobile operators to charge the RMB0.1 information fee from users because the service was offered by the mobile operator without the users’ approval. Also, as there is a large base for the mobile phone population, the mobile operators will make big money by charging this amount of seemingly small fee.

Source : Chinatechnews