All of the major Chinese mobile operators have had news regarding their 3G services this morning and over the weekend. Mostly China Mobile, it must be said, but China Telecom and China Unicom are making moves as well.
First, there are three stories from China Mobile.
China Mobile 1 – FarEastOne
China Mobile’s chairman, Wang Jianzhou, is currently on a nine-day tour of Taiwan. China Business News reports that China Mobile expects to finalise a huge investment in Taiwanese mobile operator FarEastOne very soon. It’s not an entirely done deal, however, as Chinese companies are not currently allowed to invest in Taiwanese telecoms. The two companies will have to submit the investment for approval before the rumoured 1.8 billion euro deal can go ahead.
China Mobile 2 – HTC
This is another story that has arisen from CEO Wang Jianzhou‘s tour of Taiwan, reported by AP. China Mobile has signed a deal with Taiwanese mobile manufacturer HTC for a joint project to develop mobile devices. China Mobile will invest 15 million euro in the project, which expects to see seven devices ready for 2010. While China Mobile has had plenty of HTC devices for sale on its network before, they’ve all been 2G. These new devices will be specifically for the 3G network.
China Mobile 3 – 100 3G launches
China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou continues the big talk with a claim that China Mobile will have more than 100 3G devices available for consumers byt the end of the year. According to the Financial Times, Mr Jianzhou has said that China Mobile will need “tens of millions” of devices that can run on its proprietary 3G network technology, TD-SCDMA. Along with the HTC device announcement, Mr. Jianzhou declared that China Mobile will sell devices from Dell and Lenovo (China’s biggest PC maker)
China Unicom – mobile email
An incredibly terse news report on Interfax China declares that China Unicom has starting testing a mobile mail service for its “Wo” 3G service. Apparently China Unicom announced today that it expects to roll the service out as early as October 1st. And that’s all they said.
So, I went looking for info on this “Wo” mobile mail business, and found a 2007 patent application from Huawei for a mobile mail service called Wo. The idea behind this service was that all mail traffic would be handled by a proxy server. You would send a mail to the server, it would process it and re-send it to your target. All the processing would be done off-network. LG had a similar claim at the start of this year.
China Telecom – mobile news TV
China Telecom has gotten together with the Xinhua News Agency for a mobile news TV service. Xinhua announced the service launch this Saturday. It will initially only be available for subscribers to Telecoms “e surfing” 3G service in Shanghai. Xinhua has been maintaining it’s own video news service since March of this year, and Telecom is now providing the infrastructure to publish it on mobile.
