5 Reasons Chinese Consumers Should Avoid the iPhone 4S

The new iPhone 4S. Er... Spot the difference.

Now that Apple’s iPhone 4S is out in the open (if not anywhere near Chinese shelves), consumers can weigh up the pros and cons of upgrading or switching to the iPhone 4S. But should they bother?

Despite some high praise for China from new CEO Tim Cook – the stat about the new Hong Kong Apple store seeing greater sales than any other opening day was pretty neat – there’s nothing special for China in the 4S. In fact, there are numerous ways in which Chinese consumers would be better off sticking with their iPhone 4 or other current smartphone. Here are 5 of them:

The new Siri in the iPhone 4S - but it doesn't support Chinese voice input.

1. The Siri voice input feature doesn’t support Chinese

Yes, the iPhone 4S’s only killer feature is not very much use in China, as Siri currently supports only English, French, and German. In contrast. Google’s more mature Voice Search feature, which is embedded in Android – and will essentially appear in Baidu’s Yi OS as well – supports voice input in both Mandarin Chinese (aka: Putonghua) and Cantonese.

But, frustratingly for some, Siri looks like it’ll be locked down to the new 4S, despite being surely capable of running on some older devices as well. Artificial differentiation… Don’t you just hate love it.

2. The iPhone 4S looks the same as the iPhone 4

On a more subjective point, there’s no denying the essential fact that it looks exactly the same as before, except for an ‘S’ whacked on the back. When people buy new things, we want a more visual incarnation of newness as well, which the 4S just cannot give. As any visitor to China will have noticed, some people like to ostentatiously display their car keys and smartphone on the bar or coffee shop table – but the iPhone 4S denies those folks any oneupmanship over iPhone 4 users.

3. You’ll get Chinese email service support in iOS 5 anyway

The only actually useful feature for Chinese iPhone users will come in a free update to iOS5 (which rolls out on October 12th) for people on older iPhones. As we reported back in June, iOS5 brings three popular Chinese email providers into the Mail app – namely Tencent’s QQ Mail, and Netease’s 163.com and 126.com mail inboxes. So you can still get this on your iPhone 4 or older 3GS.

4. Still no choice of telcos in China

If you want an iPhone and actually want to utilise 3G, you still have only one choice: China Unicom, the nation’s second-largest carrier. It’s an inconvenient situation that sees many buy a grey-import device and then just use it with GPRS (2G) on China Mobile.