IPhone 5 pre-order race begins

China Unicom launched pre-ordering for its version of the iPhone 5 Monday, on the heels of its smaller rival, China Telecom, which rolled out pre-ordering Sunday for its customized version of the gadget.

China Telecom, the smallest of the country's three carriers, started taking pre-orders Sunday, showing its eagerness to participate in the iPhone bonanza with promotional tactics such as giving supermarket gift cards or iPhone 5 aftermarket kits to certain early birds who pre-order. The telco has not yet revealed how the pre-orders are progressing.

China Unicom announced on Sina Weibo that iPhone 5 pre-orders on its online store, 10010.com, hit 100,000 as of 4pm Monday. Pre-orders via China Unicom's service hotline, physical stores, and authorized retail outlets were not revealed.

Apple Inc announced Friday that the iPhone 5 will debut in the Chinese mainland market on December 14.

Both China Unicom and China Telecom said they will begin selling the iPhone 5 as soon as it debuts on the mainland, but neither has announced prices or detailed subsidy policies for their versions of the gadget.

Customer service staff at both carriers told the Global Times Monday that their iPhone 5 prices will likely be similar to prices for the iPhone 4S when it first arrived in the market.

For China Unicom, that figure was at least 5,888 yuan ($945.24), and for China Telecom at least 5,788 yuan.

An iPhone 5 sold without a contract by Apple on the mainland will cost 5,288 yuan and up, the US company said, at least 300 yuan more than the iPhone 4S when it went on sale in January.

Purchasing iPhones via the carriers remains the top choice of consumers, according to an online poll launched by Chinese news website qq.com in November. Over 30 percent of some 30,000 respondents said they would choose to buy the smartphone via a carrier, while 18.6 percent would buy it via Apple's official outlets.

Some home appliance retailers including Suning, Gome and Dazhong are also taking pre-orders for the iPhone 5.

Skeptics said it is unlikely the iPhone 5 will have the mojo to keep up the buying fever created in the past by the Cupertino, California-based phone maker.

"The iPhone 5 shows Apple's continued leadership in software, but does not show great innovation in terms of hardware, which may be why its rivals increasingly erode its position in the smartphone market," Roger Sheng, a Shanghai-based research director at Gartner Inc, told the Global Times Monday.