{ Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: SMS }
Monk and his mobile
credits: Michaeeel
As in most Western countries, mobile phones are also very popular in China, among all different age groups and walks of life — sometimes seen in very unusual places. The contrast between China and other Western countries shows up in the — astronomical — numbers: up to 1997, there was little over 10 million mobile phone service subscriptions… today, there are more than 400 million.
Even more impressive is use of short messages (SMS): just in the first 10 months of 2005, there were more than 260 billion. Short messages are so popular that such demand pushes the industry into creating a myriad of services based on systems that automatically answer messages sent through SMS from costumers: for example, in big cities like Shanghai, one can check the Yellow Pages through SMS, make restaurant reservations through SMS, and so on.
The Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: SMS by Itamar Medeiros, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.About this entry
You're currently reading “Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: SMS”, an entry on { design@tive } information design
- Published:
- 10.27.06 / 12pm
- Category:
- china, consumer behavior, culture, information technology, interaction, media, mobile
- Related Entries:
- Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: Metrics on Mobile Media Consumption in China
- Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: Online Transactions through SMS
- Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: over 555 million mobile phone users
- Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: sending 17 billion text messages during Spring Festival
- Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: Mobile phones fail to pick up sales
3 Comments
Jump to comment form | comments rss [?] | trackback uri [?]