Apple CEO Tim Cook played up the importance of the company’s recent China Mobile deal in a recent press briefing in Beijing, the Wall Street Journal reports. China Mobile will start selling the iPhone 5s and 5c on Friday. “As of this weekend we will be selling iPhones in more than 3,000 additional locations,” Cook said.
” It’s a monumental day and a watershed moment.” China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua said the carrier has received several million preorders for the iPhone — a recent WSJ report noted Foxconn has shipped more than 1 million iPhone 5s units to China Mobile already. Cook said, “…Today is a beginning and I think there are lots more things our companies can do together in the future.”
In a separate report from the same briefing, the WSJ revealed Cook’s comments at greater length. Cook said using the iPhone with China Mobile’s TD-LTE network makes it “a new product, this is a world phone.
Now you can take your iPhone in China use it on TD-LTE and if you travel to the United States you can now use it on FDD-LTE. This is a big deal, it’s huge, and so I couldn’t be happier with how we’re doing.” Cook also said the key meetings for closing the deal took place in fall 2012 and Jan. 2013, “and then it was a matter of preparing the organizations and executing and working the details.”
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