China Mobile has been offering limited BlackBerry devices and service for about two years so far, before which consumers had to buy both from Hong Kong and roam, but selection is about to get a bit better as RIM has struck a deal with distributor Digital China. While it doesn’t look like they manage much the retail front-end themselves (although they do supply stores in 19 cities across China), Digital China’s work in IT infrastructure is likely a big part of RIM’s work with them, even if it’s only in so far as doing BlackBerry Enterprise Server installations, or hosted BES. It’s tricky having a watchful government like China’s allow all BlackBerry data run off to RIM’s servers in Canada, and even after getting through the mess of red tape, that’s a long way to go, and could affect the end-user’s performance. Hopefully Digital China can keep things nicely optimized, but a RIM VP mentioned awhile back about the possibility of a Chinese factory… I wonder if they would ever consider a a local data centre there?
[via RIM]