As I have written before, I am suspecting that the commoditization of smartphone hardware is shifting power to carriers.
Recently we have learned that China Telecom has formed an exclusive partnership with Microsoft to sell the Xbox One in China from September 2014.
I do not have enough knowledge of the market to make any conclusions, but I sense that this is a part of a general trend towards carriers exercising more power over hardware vendors. It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds.
Naofumi Kagami 