Will Nokia, Microsoft Make Life Tough for Apple in China?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Apple(AAPL) bulls must have just missed the news out of China. It's difficult to blame them. It hit the wire over the weekend. And, by Monday, nothing was going to kill the high of a $30.90 increase in the price of America's favorite stock.

Leave it to DigiTimes to downplay the news. At the same time, you've got to give them credit for actually running the story in the first place. Few others did.

In case you missed it, backed by Microsoft(MSFT) , Nokia(NOK) actually owns a larger chunk of the Chinese smartphone market than Apple -- 7% versus 6%. Google's(GOOG) Android operation system dominates in the country at over 60%. Now, to be fair to both sides (as if it has to be a dichotomous battle between good and evil), imprecision abounds.

First, a Microsoft executive broke the news and, as DigiTimes notes , these smartphone market share numbers come from a time period only known as "recently." To get our hands on anything definitive, we'll need the objective monthly and/or quarterly data from a source such as Gartner.

That said, let's face the facts. If word came out that Apple, say, sent its CEO over to China to shake hands with politicians or a few Chinese guys got into a scuffle in front of an Apple store, media outlets would trip over one another to report the news. I can't blame them. There's no question that when the company Steve Jobs built and Tim Cook can only hope to sustain does something, it's big news. Frankly, it deserves a bigger headline and wider distribution than when something happens with Nokia or even Microsoft.

Still, you might expect more than a handful of folks to report these early, even if imprecise, results out of China. Nokia's Lumia, launched in March with China Telecom, is apparently selling well. But, not so fast. Here's more imprecision from the DigiTimes report: