Senior Apple staff are to visit China to get into top level negotiations with China Unicom, the second largest telecommunications operator in China. They will discuss the launch strategy for the iPhone in China, a source told Sina.com.

China Mobile (the largest Chinese telecommunications operator) has officially announced a customized interface OMS (Open Mobile System), which is Android-based. As we all know, the mobile web is not like the World Wide Web. Not every device can run on every mobile network; not every mobile app can operate on every mobile device that is connected to the mobile web. Google did a good thing with Android, which is going to be a big success. They’ve got the right approach to the market, they are open in every way possible. To add to this current dynamic, Lenovo, which is China’s number one mobile phone vendor, is going to launch the oPhone (the 1st OMS mobile) and are now accelerating its time-to-market. According to one mobile phone assessment report, the Lenovo oPhone has good performance and looks well designed. However, as this report says, the OMS still has the same large number of residual defects as the Android system. And its weak third-party software support is an another shortcoming as well.

Overall, though, the oPhone is on eye-level with the iPhone and is not to be underestimated. They are following a different application distribution model, which also shows why Apple and China Mobile have so far not warmed to each other: oPhone apps are embedded with many services from China Mobile, such as Fetion, newsletter, phone mail, etc. Some people think that even when the iPhone enters the Chinese market, it’s still doubtful that the apps of the App Store will become popular among Chinese users. The iPhone is hugely popular in the US and Europe because Apple has many loyal fans there and it has been able to extend the success of iTunes to the launch of the App Store. China Mobile knows this model and it will focus on the localization of design and promotion as much as possible when they promote the oPhone. It is to launch the Mobile Market in August, which had already provided 582 games, 178 mobile theme, and 344 apps up to July 3rd. Whether Mobile Market can be equally as successful as the App Store or not still depends on China Mobile’s operational and organizational abilities.

Some people may think that the oPhone will even kill the iPhone, but I do not share this view. The iPhone is not an ordinary mobile, so its launch will have some deep influence in the 3G market of China. That’s why both China Mobile and China Unicom are thinking a great deal about the iPhone’s launch in China. I believe competition will be increasing in the 3G market day by day. For a large number of Chinese mobile users, this is actually not bad news.

I’m quite a fan of speech typing software, which I’m using right now, so I was very interested when my colleague Ralf Haller blogged recently about his experiences using Google’s voice recognition for search on his iPhone, which seemed to cope pretty well with everyday words but was rather challenged by place names etc. I just came across another review in the Dallas Morning News of Google’s and Vlingo’s competing speech typing software for the iPhone (and in Vlingo’s case, Blackberry):

Pros: Very accurate for speakers with American accents in quiet places. Easy to use. Reduce the need for typing.

Cons: Struggle with background noise and non-American accents. Don’t work for SMS or e-mail on iPhone.

Bottom line: Breakthrough applications that will change the way you use your iPhone or BlackBerry. Download immediately.

These products are clearly maturing nicely. However, according to the BBC, they’re going to be blown out of the water before year end by a small British company based in Hereford, who are planning to offer the world’s first ‘fully accurate’ totally voice-controlled phone. The BBC video shows a presenter standing in a rather low-tech looking factory holding a prototype of the Zumba, a small, very plain looking box, with a kind of a flat clip that is looped over the ear, speaking text to the user, and transmitting voice replies to be converted to text by the Zumba server (which the company claims to be 100% secure). “Whatever happens, this is very exciting tech indeed!” comments the dialaphone blog, and even The Register gave it a straightfaced report. Wired, however, is less convinced, put off not only by the “100% accurate, 100% secure” tag, but also by the fact that the company would not let the presenter actually test a prototype for “security reasons”:

Is your snake-oil sense a-tinglin’? It should be. This video further charts the descent of the Beeb from an internationally respected and neutral reporting machine into a populist tabloid of a TV company.

Ouch!

I’ve actually been using MacSpeech (which is based on Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) to write most of this post. Oddly enough, the only words it’s really struggled with was “nuances” — it refused to give me the option of a capital letter and an apostrophe — and Zumba (for obvious enough reasons). I cut and paste URLs using a mouse, I have to confess, but even so, I’m pretty impressed with the performance of this software. It doesn’t enable me to produce a mountain of prose at breakneck speed. But that’s because I just don’t think that fast — this thing is way faster than my typing speed.

Given that I had to train MacSpeech for about 15 minutes so that it can recognize my speech patterns, that they recommend processor speed of a least 1GHz and a 1Gb of RAM, and that the support folders also require over 1Gb of hard disk space, you can understand why getting this sort of thing to work on a mobile phone is something of a challenge, and why I tend to agree with Wired’s view of the Zumba phone!

Location-based social networks have been a theme for a few years now, but pretty much dropped off the radar until recently. Until iPhone apps, that is. There are different services, but essentially all of them help you locate friends and services the same time and place as you, so you can, for example, see that Joe is shopping in the same street as you right now, and find somewhere to invite him for coffee. Now these apps seem to be making headway, and could be a great route for local publicity, as local as the newspaper and as immediate as local radio - and targeted, too.

The Washington Post did a good review of location-based social networks for the iPhone last week, so here’s a very short view of the main players. The early leaders, Loopt and Moximity, came out well before the iPhone, but are heavily targeting it now. Moximity uses your existing contacts from Facebook and Twitter; Loopt has even given TechCrunch its own version so TechCrunch followers can meet each other at conferences. Pelago’s Whrrl, for example, is strong on local information, whereas uLocate’s ‘Where‘ app or the Limbo service, with its own Facebook-style wall, provide the chance to meet new people. Zintin, has a group chat feature, too. All are on Washington Post partner TechCrunch’s Crunchbase service for more business background details. Washington Post’s view is that none of them is quite a killer app yet, and that it’s a matter of time before MySpace and Facebook come in and take over.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, for one thing Facebook was there when the iPhone launched, and that has not stopped others getting the funding or the kudos, e.g. Pelago’s recent successful round. I don’t think we can be sure Facebook is going to be a winner here despite an early advantage. Location-based services are different from the home social network, because they are perfect when you are not at home, and not much use when you are. ‘Cometh the platform, cometh the app’ could be the story.

It’s not just the nature of the service, but the way the market grows. Though Loopt etc. were originally aimed at the whole mobile market, the key platform is now the iPhone, with strong sales, user-friendliness, strong sales, and of course the Appstore. So the market also contains an interesting positive feedback loop that is different from PC sales. The mobile phone is a social instrument at heart, and location-based social networking apps could be as attractive to some users as SMS. If the vehicle is the iPhone, and the app catches on among groups of friends, that will push sales of both phone and app, a from of localized viral growth that depends completely on adoption within particular groups. Perhaps a key to what happens next is how other phone manufacturers will respond to the threat of Apple getting the kind of market traction they did with the iPod.