Does the iPhone 4S Still Need a Permit to Launch in China?

Chinese iPhone carrier partner China Unicom has allegedly just received an early holiday gift and, with it, the mobile phone company hopes to put some much-anticipated Apple smartphones into stockings by the end of December. But some speculation as to which iPhone China Unicom has received a regulatory permit for could put some coal in the hopes of China's iPhone aficionados.

According to the blog M.I.C. Gadget, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has given China Unicom the official go-ahead to begin selling the iPhone 4S in the form of a network access permit – the final piece of the regulatory puzzle that China Unicom had been waiting for, as of last month, in order to release the iPhone 4S to the masses.

"We will start sales once we get the certificate from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology," said China Unicom's Yu Yingtao in an interview with Sina last month. "It's not up to us. We've already done all of our preparations; we're just waiting on the permit."

That said, there's some dissention among the news ranks as to which variant of the iPhone received the network access permit. Penn-Olson's C. Custer reports that the smartphone passing through the regulatory barriers was in fact the iPhone 4, not Apple's newer iPhone 4S. The confusion stems from the model numbers being used in the approval process – it's suggested that the "A1431" device listed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was incorrectly assumed by reporters to have been the iPhone 4S when, in actuality, it's just the standard ol' iPhone 4.

"Of course, this doesn't mean the 4s hasn't been approved by MIIT, or that it isn't about to hit the market," Custer writes. "It just means we're back to where we started: we just don't know."

One thing we do know, however, is that iPhone 4S will likely upon its official release in China. The country represents Apple's largest-growing market and analysts are expecting as rapid a sell-out for the China launch of the iPhone 4S as that which was seen in Hong Kong – where iPhone 4S preorders sold out within 10 minutes of their initial availability.

According to Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White, Apple pulled from mainland China during the September quarter, a 270 percent increase year-to-year.

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