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Talk about popular things in China! China’s most popular IM protocol is neither MSN / Windows Live Messenger nor AOL Instant Messenger (or MobileMe), but rather — a locally-made chat program called Tencent QQ, or more simply known as “QQ”. Have no idea how popular the thing is? There is a car out there called the QQ. Now we’ve no idea if Tencent (the company behind QQ) actually made it.

But we digress. Chinese Mac site Beijing Mac House has it that QQ for iPhone 2.5 has been released. The equally popular iPhone (from outside the mainland, of course) is what you need to run QQ for iPhone — and the app works great on WAP (CMNET and CMWAP) as well as over wifi. The interface also looks pretty good.

In terms of new updates, QQ for iPhone 2.5 adds support for saving QQ groups, improves chat transcripts, has a new feature for blocking individual group messages, and sports a better interface. Bugs, including those regarding logon, special characters, emoticons and group lists, have also been quashed. Now that we’ve you mouthwatering away digitally, it’s best to let you download it.

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Global Mac News, techblog86

A myriad of interesting articles by way of @frankyu, pointing us to iPhonAsia.com:

• An Apple executive team is apparently going to Beijing. Local media repots that Greg Joswiak, Apple VP for iPhone Product Marketing, will, along with a team from Apple, head to Beijing later this week. This could see iPhone talks restarted, as well as meetings with China Unicom and the PRC’s telco authorities. This is not, as the site has pointed out, the first-ever such talks; similar meetings happened earlier this year (in March and April 2009).

• A more recent post, iPhone in China… It ain’t over till it’s over, points to Tim Cook’s careful choice of words — and the oft-quoted timetable: “within a year”. The blog notes that this could mean tomorrow, or 12 months from now! There’s also a nice comparison of the iPhone and China negotiations to a basketball game between the US and China (there’s a pic of Yao Ming there, by the way). It’s not just Apple China, by the way, who wants the iPhone in the Middle Kingdom; even names like Best Buy China and Wal-Mart China are floating out there!

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Global Mac News, techblog86

If you thought that China was without an iPhone, you’re wrong. Many folks have their iPhones in China over from Hong Kong or overseas, and your fellow blogger himself is an iPhone user and a dedicated tweeter on one of these things.

News coming in from German Mac site Mac Life reports a local, official version of the iPhone OKed — but without the crucial wifi option. PRC telco laws prohibit devices sold locally from doing both voice communications and wifi — apparently to get people pay extra for using long-distance services from local telcos.

This very iPhone, then, has been ridiculed amongst the Chinese Twittersphere as the “eunuch iPhone” (太监 iPhone). The phone is slated to be bundled with China Unicom, which uses the WCDMA protocol (as opposed to heavyweight China Mobile sticking by Chinese-made TD-SCDMA protocols).

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Global Mac News, techblog86