There is “no sign of the sort of sellout reception that greeted the smart phone at its introduction in other countries,” The Wall Street Journal reported, adding that there were no lines for the iPhone at the Apple store in Beijing, the company’s only location in China.

Sounds like a lackluster launch, and with Apple (AAPL) and China Unicom, the only carrier authorized to sell the device in the country, declining to disclose sales figures, it’s difficult to argue that it was otherwise. It clearly wasn’t the rousing success to which we’ve become accustomed. That said, it probably wasn’t quite the bust it’s been made out to be, either.

Why? Well, consider this: There were launch ceremonies in 30 provinces. To date, we’ve heard anecdotal reports from–as best I can tell–one of them. And while it’s admittedly concerning to learn that a China Unicom store in Beijing sold just 10 iPhones last Saturday, that’s just one store. The device was on sale in many, many others (1000, according to Apple COO Tim Cook) across 30 provinces and 285 Chinese cities in a nation with 710 million mobile-phone subscribers.

Finally, while it’s true that the prices Apple and China Unicom are charging for the iPhone are heady, they’re not quite as bad as we’ve been led to believe. “I think the western media has misconstrued the iPhone pricing in China,” Dan Butterfield, editor of iPhonAsia told me.

“Nine out of 10 reports that I’ve seen have simply repeated the ‘too expensive’ mantra,” Butterfield explained. “They then quote the contract free price point–4,999 yuan ($730) to 6,999 yuan ($1,025) for the iPhone 3GS. They argue that you can buy a gray-market iPhone cheaper and it has WiFi….The truth…the gray-market price is marginally cheaper for those who want to go ‘prepaid.’ But when you examine the full matrix of China Unicom price/plans, you quickly realize that you can save big by going on contract vs. prepaid (pay as you go). There are even four price/plans where your iPhone if free. The iPhone subsidy increases for those who opt for more expensive monthly plans.”

Butterfield elaborates: “Moreover, if you want to access ‘3G,’ there is no good carrier option other than China Unicom. You can run at 2G speeds on China Mobile or China Telecom. But neither of these two networks support the chipset in iPhone. China Mobile runs TDSCDMA 3G and China Telecom runs CDMA2000 3G. So you are left with China Unicom’s WCDMA 3G–a world-standard 3G protocol fully supported by iPhone 3G/3GS. Why not go on contract and get a subsidized iPhone that is well below the ‘too expensive’ (contract free) prices that the media is shouting about?”

And in the end, does it even matter? As Butterfield noted, an iPhone sale is an iPhone sale–whether it’s made by a gray-market vendor or an authorized one. And either way, it’s good for Apple.

So was the iPhone’s launch in China really a bust? “Probably not,” said Butterfield. “Was it a rousing success? Probably not. The truth is somewhere in the middle.”

UPDATE: Well what do you know: China Unicom just coughed up some first weekend sales numbers for the iPhone and … well, they’re not much to look. The carrier sold just 5,000.

In a hastily released statement, the IFPI downplayed the abrupt change of tack, claiming the amended charges will simplify its case. Said IFPI counsel Peter Danowsky, “It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works.”

The Pirate Bay had a different take on the matter though. Said co-founder Peter Sunde in a Twitter message: EPIC WINNING LOL.

Still, it sounds promising. With downlink speeds in the 2-4Mbps range, Xohm is about twice as fast as current cellular broadband networks. Sprint’s service plans include a $25 monthly home subscription, a $30 “on-the-go” plan and a $10 day-pass program. All three require a PC card or modem and a subscriber agreement permitting Xohm to “use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth-intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing.”

So much for that “open network” promise. Well, at least Xohm is up and running, right? Sprint Nextel (S) first announced plans to deploy a nationwide WiMax network in August 2006.

It’s a Comcastic day for BitTorrent. This morning the cable provider, under fire for degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service on its broadband network, announced plans to develop better ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic. To that end, Comcast (CMCSA) will work with BitTorrent to develop a network capacity-management technique that is protocol agnostic.

Said Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, “This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, nondiscriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”

Of course you do. You just didn’t realize it until FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pointed it out, right?

Anyway, like most such corporately altruistic pledges, this one has the potential to do more good than bad–or more bad than good. “… We must recognize that these are two commercial entities whose goals are, in the end, to make sure that their networks and technologies are as profitable as possible,” writes Public Knowledge’s Jef Pearlman. “One can conceive of a world where an ISP and an application developer band together to make a proprietary system in which sanctioned application data gets preferred treatment, the ISP gets greater control of the application running on your computer, and both companies are happy in the exact situation we want to prevent. Time will tell what this partnership actually means.”

But what is there for the software giant to talk about these days other than Yahoo, really? Why that old saw, software interoperability, of course. In a statement issued this morning, the software giant announced changes to its technology and business practices intended to “increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors”–which translates roughly as “appease European antitrust officials.”

Among the key changes:

• Microsoft will make the protocols and APIs in its high-volume products openly available to the developer community.
• Microsoft will indicate which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will issue licenses to those patents on “reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, at low royalty rates.”
• Microsoft will implement a covenant not to sue open-source developers for development or noncommercial distribution of implementations of those protocols.
• Microsoft will support open standards and work with developers and standards-setting bodies to enable the transfer of user data from Microsoft applications to apps designed by third-party developers.

“Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions,” Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said in a statement. “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

Quite a move for a company whose leadership once likened Linux to “cancer” and derided open-source licensing models as “Pacman-like.” Though it’s not like we haven’t seen this all before.

“They are not making the source codes open, but they are opening the gates that allow you into the compound,” said Matt Asay, a general manager at open-source management company Alfresco. “It’s a great first step. … It’s a bold move by Microsoft. It’s a good indication of Microsoft’s self-confidence that it feels it can open up what effectively are its crown jewels and not lobotomize its company at the same time.”

“Today the Samba team announced that they’re satisfied with the agreement, and are taking a Work Group Server Protocol Program trade secret and copyright license,” Microsoft Director of Platform and Technology Strategy Sam Ramji wrote in a post to the Microsoft Port 25 blog. “This will give them access to Microsoft specifications for the protocols in WSPP (such as file, print, and user and group administrative services) and allow the Samba team to create, use and distribute implementations. I expect this will significantly improve the process of Samba development, and produce better quality inter-operation between Windows and Linux/Unix environments. … This is an historic moment, and one that I’m proud of.”

As he should be. Even if it did come under duress.

Samba, which has been struggling valiantly for years to support Windows server protocols, was understandably overjoyed to finally ink such a deal. “They’re giving us all the documentation to make everything work,” Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba, told InfoWorld. “We will have no more excuses to suck … if we don’t have something, we won’t be able to say it’s not our fault we don’t know how to do it.”

(Incidentally, you’ll find Microsoft’s Holiday Gift Guide here. And boy, is it ever something: Traditional calendars for Excel! Three dozen Outlook add-ins! Oh, and thanks for the photo, “Encyclopedia Brown.”)