Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.

Here are some pictures from the Beijing Apple Store (taken Friday afternoon Chinese time, just before sales began):

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apple_iPhone_beijing_launch

And these pictures show China Unicom seems to have over-prepared their “sales points”, too:

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These rather disappointing, initial reactions don’t mean China rejects the iPhone at all, however. Estimates put the number of iPhones sold in China before the official launch today (through imports from Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example) between two and five million units so far. China as a whole has 710 million total cellular subscribers, the most in the world.

Source: MobileCrunch