Despite talks between Apple and China Mobile hitting rough ground, negotiations with China's number two carrier are reportedly going far better.
China Unicom is China's second largest mobile provider, just lagging behind the aforementioned China mobile. China Unicom has 125 million GSM subcribers and 43 million CDMA subscribers and unlike China Mobile runs a WCDMA network (as of May 17 this year). This is a serious advantage to Apple as the current iPhone runs on WCDMA so wouldn't require an entire new device to be manufactured.
A spokesman for China Unicom told China Business News newspaper on Wednesday that talks began between the company and Apple in October last year but the spokesman didn't give much detail, simply saying "the company has not authorized us to provide any explanation to the media".
Unfortunately it appears several issues lie ahead, for example in China WiFi connectivity is not allowed on mobile phones according to regulations of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The feature will either have to be removed or disabled via software by Apple.
Also China Unicom wants Apple to include different software applications "that Chinese users are more familiar with," but Apple appears reluctant to concede to such demands.