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.
3 replies on “Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: SMS”
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