Mikey Campbell
A page advertising reservations for China Mobile Beijing's 4G LTE service now features Apple's iPhone 5s, as well as a bejeweled golden apple, hinting that preorders for the popular device may be in the offing.
While not conclusive evidence, the reservation page seen above, spotted by intrepid reader Jeffrey, strongly suggests China Mobile is about to kick off iPhone preorders.
If the world's largest wireless provider does in fact initiate an iPhone reservation system in the next few hours, it would jibe with a Wall Street Journal report that claiming preorders would start on Thursday, Dec. 12. At the time of this writing, it is nearly 1 p.m. on Thursday in Beijing, China.
The Journal further claimed the iPhone would officially roll out on Dec. 18, contradicting a prior statement from China Mobile denying it had reached a deal with Apple to sell the handset.
The carrier has already posted multiple reservation webpages for its upcoming 4G LTE network, but so far only one has alluded to the iPhone. In early December, a Suzhou-based subsidiary posted a reservation page prominently featuring both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. The link was quickly killed, but not before jumpstarting the media speculation machine.
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Wesley Hilliard
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Andrew Orr
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24 Comments
The link above does not show the ticker. The link which shows the ticker and a bejewelled apple is at http://www.bj.10086.cn/service/mobile/mingxingji/yuyue/
P.S Can anyone translate the page please?
there is only less than 10K people reserved.
It means the demand is weaker than expected.
Based on this, will anal ists say Apple is doomed, lower their expectation.
http://www.bj.10086.cn/service/mobile/mingxingji/yuyue/ Is the link to get the number of preorders in Beijing only. It is up >20 per second...
I honestly don't understand why no one is willing to wait for an official announcement from either China Mobile or Apple. Why is everyone trying to jump the gun to scoop a story? It's not as though anyone is going to get a prize for it. Are people really doing this speculation nonsense just to manipulate Apple's share price? It's likely that even when an official announcement is made, it's not going to boost Apple's share price considerably. I think Apple is well beyond the ability to rise much for such weak news. There are far too many negative factors preventing Apple's share price from rising.