China Telecom in talks to carry Pre? 22
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 1:34 pm EDT 
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]
22 Comments
Awesome! I have friends in China who bought Pre here and currently running on China Telecom's EV-DO network!
A GSM Pre is definitely fabulous! And China Telecom also provides home cable internet and WIFI!!!
Please tell me this means Palm will inplement some sort of IME so I can get Japanese input on my Pre soon.
Please tell me this means Palm will inplement some sort of IME so I can get Japanese input on my Pre soon.
HUGE!!
This is very good news.
Might even make PALM stock a good investment as well.
This is unrelated, but still Palm Pre relevant. Does anyone know if Skyscape has made a Pre version of their medical software? I am aware of their version for Classic but not sure of an actual Palm Pre (WebOS) version.
Treo was the best in Chinese input with a record of 220/min. So data entry is not a problem. China Telecom has 39 million CDMA users and leading in user expansion in the first half of this year.
Some Pre user in China has already changed his WebOS into Chinese :http://brunic.com/
Some user reported successful 3G signal connection already and was happy about it's speed. I think it requires a hack since I was not able to get data in July when I visited China
"Some Pre user in China has already changed his WebOS into Chinese"
whoah! thats sweet... thanks for the link, it looks well done.
Im heading to China next week....AGAIN ! I will have my Pre with me. I have used Palm phones there in the past, and they work excellent on China Mobile's network, so I'm sure the Pre will also work great.
Chinese users on the Mainland LOVE Techie phones ! All you need to do to get a conversation going with someone is to whip out your Palm ( Pre in this case)in any public place, and within 5 minutes, a few people will be standing next to you asking questions, getting friendly....always fun !
Im SURE the Pre will sell like wildfire over there !
what i heard from local media is China Telecom is going to import Blackberry and Palm Treo,but all our Chinese palmers hope they will import Palm Pre too, I've asked a friend of mine who works for China Telecom for the detail. And we also hope webos could support Chinese. China is a large market which will help Palm turn around the decline, we all hope they can pay a little more attention on this market.Maybe from Chinese version OS.