China Unicom’s Chairman Chang Xiobing told reporters that the company signed up only 5,000 iPhone users since official launch last Friday. However, the Chairman remained upbeat about the iPhone and said that the iPhone would boost China Unicom’s revenue for fourth quarter, although the company will see increased costs due to advertising and other expenses related to iPhone launch.

The two main factors affecting official iPhone sales in China are cost of the iPhone and lack of WiFi. Price of an unlocked iPhone on Chinese gray market is way less than price asked by Unicom. Also the iPhone available on the grey market has WiFi functionality, which is absent from official iPhone because of Chinese regulations.

Even though iPhone had a bad start in China, comScore is reporting that iPhone now represents one third of all touchscreen phones in US. iPhone is the only phone with double digit touchscreen market share at 32.9 percent. iPhone is followed by LG Dare with 8.7 percent and LG Voyager with 7.8 percent. BlackBerry Storm is at number four with 7 percent touchsceen share and T-Mobile G1 is number fifth with 3.6 percent market share. The touchscreen phone market jumped 159 percent in US during last one year, it went from 9.22 million in August 2008 to 23.84 million in August 2009. Analysts believe that adoption of touchscreen phones will accelerate further as more touchscreen phones are introduced.