China Unicom will launch the iPhone 4 in China on Saturday and says it has taken 50,000 pre-orders on the first day of accepting them.
The phone will be sold through China Unicom's shops as well as Apple retail stores. One new Apple store, at Xidan in Beijing, will open on the same day, Apple said.
The device will retail at Apple stores 4,999 yuan ($743.60) for the 16GB model and 5,999 yuan for the 32GB without a contract.
But Unicom is charging between 5,880 yuan and 6,999 yuan up-front for the handsets and a deposit on a two-year service contract, WSJ.comsaid.
Unicom's hefty price tag, Chinese consumers' reluctance to become tied in to lengthy contracts, and the wide availability of gray-market and counterfeit iPhones have led some analysts to suspect that Unicom will struggle to win customers with the handset exclusive, the paper added.
Take-up of the iPhone 3G S, which Unicom launched in China last October, has so far been slow - Apple's share of the nation's smartphone market is believed to be just 7.1%.
But a Unicom spokesperson toldDow Jones the operator took nearly 50,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4 the day it opened registrations on Friday.
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