China Unicom today confirmed that it would start selling Apple’s iPhone in China on May 17th. China Unicom is the second largest cellphone carrier in China with about 150 million subscribers. The company will also be rolling out its new 3G network on the same day in 55 Chinese cities to support iPhone 3G.

Unicom started advertising the iPhone on its website yesterday and some of the features mention on the website are not available in present generation iPhone. The feature list includes Wave-to-pay, Mobile TV, Tethering and Video conferencing, none of these features are available on present generation iPhone. Signs that Apple will add Wave-to-pay and tethering in iPhone OS 3.0 are present in the beta release of the software. It is possible that Unicom will sell a TV adapter like SoftBank sells in Japan with the iPhone. And as for video conferencing may be the next gen iPhone will have a additional lower megapixel camera in front for video calls/conferencing.

It is almost confirmed that we will see next generation iPhone in summer and it will have major hardware and software enhancements. Our sources tell us that we might even see two new iPhone models in summer of 2009.
[Via Apple 2.0 Blog]