Dopod Communications Inc is "cautiously optimistic" about China's mobile market this year and the smart phone vendor yesterday said it expected 2010 sales to grow 40 percent year on year.

Dopod, whose overseas brand is HTC, said China's 3G development would boost its revenue this year but the uncertain policy of carriers presented a risk, according to Paul Hsu, Dopod's chief operating officer.

"We have high expectations for TD-SCDMA and phones with the Google system but the market result still depends on the carriers," Hsu said.

He cited the example of China Unicom largely building its 3G strategy around the popular iPhone, which uses wideband-CDMA technology.

The iPhone's popularity has hurt Dopod's WCDMA phone as it gets little support from China Unicom, according to Hsu.

He didn't know whether this would change this year.

In 2010, Dopod will launch six 3G phones based on the homegrown TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) technology, which has been adopted by China Mobile.