SteveWebel [dot] Com

China Mobile is in talks with Apple to sell the iPhone in China, the company’s CEO said on Tuesday. But he’s not keen on the type of revenue-sharing model that Apple has insisted on elsewhere in the world.”Our customers like this kind of fashionable product,” Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile’s CEO, on the sidelines of the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress in Macau.But in a speech at the conference, Wang said he doesn’t like some of the new business models emerging in the mobile phone industry, including handset makers wanting to share revenue with mobile operators. ”We still think we can maintain the operator-centric model because we have the customers, the end users,” Wang said.Apple has been signing exclusive deals with operators to sell its iPhone, including O2 in the U.K. and AT&T in the U.S. As part of the deal, Apple requires the operators to pay it a portion of their iPhone subscriber revenue.Apple has said it will roll out iPhones in Asia next year, and China Mobile would be a good catch for the company. It is the world’s largest mobile operator, boasting almost 350 million subscribers at the end of September.

If they can actually work out a reasonable deal with China Mobile or another carrier, this is going to be very tempting! Up to this point, the iPhone was out of the realm of reality for me, so it was not a problem. Now I’m gonna have to convince myself how I DON’T actually want one of these!