China, Cell Phone | featured news

Apple's China sales rose at a healthy clip in its latest quarter, but the numbers belied growing concerns as the bonanza in high-end smartphones started winding down.

China has passed the U.S. in the third quarter to become the world's largest smartphone market by shipments, but may find it tough to hold the position in the next two quarters, according to a research firm. China's smartphone shipments reached 23.9 million units by the end of the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. This put the country just ahead of the U.S. where 23.3 million smartphones were shipped in the quarter.

As the company tangles with the Chinese government, it puts in jeopardy its tentative grip on the cellphone market in a nation where staggering growth in mobile search is expected.

In its public wrangling with the Chinese government, Google Inc.

Google on Tuesday postponed the launch of its mobile phone in China, adding to the potential commercial fallout of its dispute with Beijing over Internet censorship and e-mail hacking....

Apple's iPhone is making its long-awaited formal debut in the world's most populous mobile phone market, without a key feature and at higher prices than widely available black market models. Apple's local service provider, China Unicom Ltd., hopes the iPhone will give it an edge against giant rival China Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest phone company by subscribers.

Chinese worker Sun Danyong was responsible for handling the prototypes of one of the world's hottest products — the iPhone. When one of the gadgets went missing and his company began investigating him, he jumped off his apartment building and killed himself.

HTC plans to start selling a smartphone based on Google's Android operating system next month in China, the first such Google-based phone in the world's biggest wireless market.