iPhone from China

Hey all, I hope I'm posting in the right section.

I recently went overseas to China to visit some family and was lucky enough to be gifted a new iPhone 4S (decent upgrade from my 4). When I got back here (Australia), the google search function redirects to the google.cn page and does not work. I have to manually go to the google web page in order to look something up. I did some research and apparently this is a well known problem with phones bought in China abd theres no fix. ive tried changing the region settings and everything suggested with mo avail. So I just wanted to know if this is any grounds for apple to replace my phone? I just wanted some opinions of whether or not i have a shot as the apple store is a bit of a trek from my house.

Thanks

Thanks. But I've already been using the phone for 3 weeks now. Plus, since it was a gift, I have no receipt or anything.

ah, okay. ill make an appointment for next week. i dont think activation is a problem here in Australia. all iphones come fully unlocked and so long as you pay out your 24m contract which includes the handset payments, they don't really care what you do with the phone.

Yeah it's definitely a genuine iPhone. Syncs with itunes and I checked the warranty online at apple and its valid till nov 2013. I just hope that they can exchange it since u should be able to take an unlocked iphone from one country to another without experiencing major hassles. Unless they explicitly stated that u can't use one of the major features when taking an iPhone from country A to country B which i believe they did not.