Why China and Brazil? Well, for one thing, they are developing markets. For another, Dell (DELL) already has partners there.

“Besides size (China Mobile has over 500 million subscribers, and Claro serves more than 42 million), we have existing telecom partnerships with them,” Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca said in a post. “Back in April, we were the first to embed China Mobile’s technology into our Mini 10 netbook. And if you’ve been watching, you know Dell has agreements with lots of other providers like Vodafone in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. We’ve partnered with AT&T and Verizon in the United States to offer mobile broadband on different products, and we have agreements with other carriers in Asia.”

Interesting. Presumably this means we’ll see the Mini rolled out in short order in these other countries as well. As you may recall, Dell was rumored to be building an Android handset for AT&T (T) in early October.

In any event, those higher prices and the device’s lack of built-in Wi-Fi don’t seem to be as much of a barrier as you might think. And if those issues do end up tempering sales a bit, well, perhaps China Unicom can make them up by poaching iPhone users from rival China Mobile. As iPhonAsia’s Dan Butterfield reported earlier this week, China Unicom is offering an amnesty to users of gray-market iPhones.

“This amnesty program is designed to entice some 1.5 million grey-market iPhone owners in China to sign a contract and pop in a Unicom 3G sim card to take advantage of WCDMA 3G speeds and a variety of new ‘Wo’ 3G services,” Butterfield writes. “The ‘upgrade to 3G’ program is no doubt aimed squarely at the approximate 1,000,000+ iPhones now running on China Mobile’s EDGE 2G network.”

[Image credit: CCID]

Apple (AAPL) declined to say what other carriers the company might be talking to, but it’s a safe bet that if the company is in discussions with a second carrier, it’s China Mobile. After all, the two companies have talked about a deal before, and while those negotiations stumbled repeatedly over issues like revenue-sharing and hardware localization, it’s hard to believe that Apple would turn its back on the world’s largest wireless carrier.

There are 600 million cellphone users in China and 415 million of them are China Mobile subscribers. That’s a hell of an opportunity to pass up, no matter how difficult negotiating with the company might be.

According to China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou, Apple hasn’t passed it up. During the company’s quarterly earnings call on Aug. 20, Jianzhou said specifically that talks between the two companies continue. Just what they might involve is anyone’s guess, although Dan Butterfield at iPhonAsia speculates that they would likely be for an EDGE 2G-only version of iPhone.

“No matter the future of TD-SCDMA, China Mobile will maintain their EDGE 2G network, which has broad coverage and a clear signal throughout major urban zones in China,” Butterfield writes. “In my view, EDGE 2G could be the bridge between Apple and China Mobile. There are hundreds of millions of low-salaried wireless consumers in China who aspire to iPhone. Many have in fact already purchased cheap Shanzhai (iClone) knock-offs. But Shanzhai iPhones are not reliable and quickly become landfill. A low-priced ‘real’ Apple iPhone running EDGE 2G only, might sell by the tens of millions.”

Unveiled in China this morning, Dell’s (DELL) new handset, reportedly known as the mini3i, runs on China’s Open Mobile System variant of Google’s (GOOG) Android OS and sports a 3.5-inch, 640×360 capacitive touchscreen and a three-megapixel camera. It also features an iPhone-esque GUI and will support applications from China Mobile’s online store, which peddles music and videos as well as games and other apps.

But sadly, the mini3i lacks WiFi and 3G support. It’s strictly a 2G device. Odd, considering China Mobile does offer TD-SCDMA, China’s locally developed 3G standard.

That said, China’s smartphone market is wide open. With mobile phone sales in the country predicted to hit 192 million units, up from 180 million this year, according to Gartner (IT), a cheap smartphone like this could find quite a niche in the lower end of the market, assuming it’s well-priced.

News of the mini3i’s debut comes as Apple works to bring the iPhone to China via China Unicom.

On Friday, China Unicom denied a report by China Business News that the company had inked a three-year exclusive iPhone deal and agreed to purchase five million of the devices. “The report is not true,” a spokesperson said. “Talks between us and Apple have been going on for some time, but no agreement has been reached yet. There are all kinds of possibilities. There is no particular timetable for the talks.”

UPDATE: Dell claims the device displayed in China is a “proof of concept.”

“The only thing that we’re confirming is that we’re in product development with China Mobile,” he told PCMag. “We haven’t named any products, and we’re not confirming anything. We were there showing a proof of concept.

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[Image Credit: mobile.163.com]

The brand and marketing analytics firm released its BrandZ Top 100 report (PDF) today, pronouncing Google (GOOG) the number one brand for the third consecutive year. The company’s brand equity: $100 billion, a first for the study.

While Google dominated the study’s rankings, it wasn’t the only tech company to make it into the top 100 or the top 10, for that matter. Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Apple (AAPL), China Mobile and Vodafone (VOD) topped the list as well, ranking second, fourth, sixth, seventh and ninth respectively.

“Five of the top 10 in the BrandZ Top 100 are technology brands,” Millward Brown Optimor said in its report. “The rapid ascent of these brands and their high values reflect the strength and velocity of the technology category, which grew by 2 percent last year,” the report reads. “The rising popularity of online search advertising, which is cheaper than display, is benefiting Google which owns 73 percent market share in this area.”

Below, Millward Brown Optimor’s top tech brands (click to enlarge):

This morning, a report in Shanghai Securities News claimed the two companies had reached an agreement that grants China Unicom three years of exclusivity. The terms are said to call for the carrier to purchase iPhones from Apple for 3,000 yuan ($439) each and guarantee annual sales of one million to two million units and at least five billion yuan ($732 million) in annual revenue.

At present, there is no revenue-sharing agreement. That had become a sticking point in negotiations and Apple (AAPL) seems to have foregone it in order to finalize the deal.

But has an overall agreement really been reached? As I noted earlier, state-run media claim it has. China Unicom, however, says otherwise.

“We have made progress but there are still some problems to be resolved,” a Unicom spokesperson told AFP. “Both sides have their own timeframe for an agreement but essentially it depends on the practical progress of the negotiations.”

That said, it seems clear that an agreement will be reached. Certainly, China Unicom would be foolish to balk at this point. To win the right to be the sole supplier of the iPhone in the world’s largest mobile market for three years would go a long way toward bolstering Unicom’s weak performance and make it easier for it to compete against rivals China Mobile and China Telecom.

Steve Jobs and I hope the iPhone will enter China as soon as possible. We are discussing this issue but we do not have an agreement.”

– China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou

It’s been nearly a year and China Mobile is still in talks with Apple about bringing the iPhone to China, though the revenue-sharing issue that had stalled the two companies was resolved back in July. Now we know why the talks keep dragging on: hardware localization. The South China Morning Post reports that China Mobile has asked Apple (AAPL) for an iPhone with Wi-Fi and 3G technology disabled.

Seems China Mobile is building a 3G network of its own using the Chinese developed TD-SCDMA standard and believes that crippling Chinese iPhones will discourage customers from unlocking the device and using it on rival China Telecom’s W-CDMA network. Though, really, China Mobile should know better. China has a thriving gray market for iPhones. In fact, Market research firm In-Stat reported earlier this year that there were some 400,000 cracked iPhones on China Mobile’s network at the end of 2007–10 percent of all iPhones sold by Apple at the time.

So, will Apple agree to the carrier’s demands and customize a piece of standardized hardware for a single region? And beyond that, could CEO Steve Jobs even bring himself to compromise the iPhone “experience”? With 600 million cellphone users in China, 415 million of them China Mobile subscribers, he just might.