By Steve Lo, posted Jul 8, 2011 at 7:11 AM, 987 views,

iPhone 4 Prototype Caught Running On China Mobile Network?

Previously in our other story, we saw that Tim Cook, the COO and acting CEO of Apple paid a visit to China Mobile recently. We did some digging and found out some interesting things from our industry sources, however up until now the majority has been unproven speculation. Today, we have a photo of a China Mobile iPhone 4 as seen here.

As many of you fine readers have brought to our attention, it seems China Mobile has been busy with the iPhone 4. For those of you not familiar with this company, China Mobile is the largest telecommunications company in China, with roughly 68% of the total market share. China Unicom, who sells the iPhone and China Telecom, which is a CDMA network, shares the rest of the market share.

So, in the image above, we see many interesting things. First notice that “swirl” in the top right corner? That is the unique symbol all China Mobile phones get when they are on the 3G network. Currently 5.6 million iPhone users are on its 2G network, and over 700,000 were activated in May alone. They are unable to access the 3G network effectively however as Apple’s baseband prevents this.

This is where the second interesting thing our dedicated team of experts here at M.I.C. Gadget notice. The baseband is a version not yet released. We saw this when Verizon was being added to the repertoire of Apple sellers in the US, both of these things leads us to believe that despite the quality of the photo it is authentic.

And you may wonder, who leaked this picture? Well, here’s what China Mobile told the Communication Network,

“So far we have not received news that our carrier has a “customized” iPhone, so we’re unable to provide any explanation about the picture leaked on the web.”

The really exciting thing for us is that for the past 8 months or so we have heard many rumors circulating about China Mobile negotiating with Apple, and perhaps being the next one to sell the iPhone in China. Historically, new iPhone resellers that are carrier based have been around the time of a product refresh. Two of our industry contacts, people familiar with the matter say this will be in September of this year, and that a contract has been signed giving China Mobile, like China Unicom rights to sell the iPhone in China. Excited yet? We sure are ^^

One more thing, China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou has previously confirmed Apple will fully support the carrier’s next generation TD-LTE technology, and the carrier is in talks with Apple over an iPhone that will run on its home-grown TD-SCDMA network.

Source: cnBeta (1), (2)