[NewsPoster]

China Mobile will be receiving the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c early next month, if a photograph of a promotional poster is genuine. The launch on the largest Chinese carrier will apparently take place on November 11th, with the iPhone to be made available as one of the first devices to use its 100Mbps TD-LTE mobile network.

The reason for the delay on China Mobile compared to the rest of the world lies with its TD-LTE network. The carrier is still waiting for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to give the all-clear to the 4G network, reports Unwired View. The rest of the China Mobile network uses TD-SCDMA, a technology that no other carrier uses and the iPhone does not support, though the LTE network being constructed is thought to be the same as other 4G networks around the world.

The poster also ties into a recent job listing from Apple, requesting an engineering manager familiar with the TD-SCDMA 3G standard. This hints that Apple may end up making a version of newer iPhones that use the standard, due to the expected patchy nature of the new TD-LTE network.

[Inkling]

Maybe Apple can persuade Chinese consumers that the blasé and overpriced iPhone 5c is "really cool" and dump the excess production there. For ideas, Apple marketing might read Mark Twain's story about when Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into paying him to whitewash a wall.

[machobbes]

Before giving stupid advice, read Tom Sawyer again and get the facts right.

[aristotles]

Inkling, are you jealous because you cannot get one?

[Charles Martin]

Apple's gonna have a heck of a good (fiscal) Q1 (aka the holiday season).

[Charles Martin]

I think some people have a very false impression that the 5c isn't doing as well as expected. I think nothing could be further from the truth. At AT&T, the iPhone 5c is outselling every other smartphone there is -- except for the iPhone 5s. The same is basically true at all other US carriers, with a SINGLE Android phone -- the Galaxy S4 -- sometimes taking second place.

It seems to me that this is an *exact repeat* of what happened when the iPhone 5 (a significant advance from the iPhone 4S) came out. Yes, it's certainly true that the iPhone 5c isn't selling as well as the iPhone 5s (when you can get one) ... but its still appears to be the second-most popular smartphone in the world, so the idea that isn't selling well is fairly obviously a belief that is only supportable if you add "in comparison to the #1 smartphone in the world, the iPhone 5s."

How the iPhone (5c and 5s respectively) will do in China cannot necessarily be divined from how well its doing in the markets its currently available in, but I expect the 5c will do at least as well as the iPhone 5 has, and the fact that it will now be available on China Mobile = guaranteed growth.

To put it another way: the idea that the 5c needs to be "dumped" anywhere is simply laughable. This cycle, so far (and with FACTS backing us up rather than *bias*) appears to be identical to the last cycle -- and I don't recall anyone claiming that Apple would need to "dump" the iPhone 4S anywhere ...