Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 23, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Almost 35 percent of respondents said they used their mobile phone as a portable music player. That is far more than in Europe or the USA, for example, where the corresponding shares range between 5.7 and 20 percent. Sending photos and videos ranks second in China, at 15.2 percent. One in ten users also said they downloaded games to their mobile phone.
“There is still considerable uncertainty in some areas when it comes to concrete figures on mobile-phone use in Germany,” Marie-Anne Winter from telecommunications portal teltarif http://www.teltarif.de explains in an interview with pressetext. This is largely because mobile-network operators do not want to release their data on their customers’ usage behaviour. “The field of multimedia applications on mobile phones is nevertheless becoming increasingly important in this country as well,” Winter says. Of a total of 80 million existing mobile-phone contracts in Germany, around ten million were UMTS customers. “Music on mobile phones in particular is already standard today,” Winter states. Games were also becoming increasingly popular among mobile customers. “However, because of their higher costs, many of the multimedia services are still found more in the business sector today,” Winter explains. As an example, she refers to sending emails by mobile phone, which has rather little importance for the average user in Germany.
The survey attributes relatively little importance in China to using videos on mobile phones. Only 0.9 percent said they used these functions on their mobile phone. That is far less than in the USA, Great Britain, Germany or Spain, for example, where the comparable figures range between 2.5 and 7.7 percent. Sending email messages by mobile phone also landed in one of the lower positions, at just under 2.5 percent. In addition, the mobile phone does not appear to be particularly popular as an information medium in China. Only 6.1 percent of Chinese people said they read their news on a mobile phone. In international comparison, this puts them clearly among the back markers. Only in Germany is the corresponding figure even lower, at 5.2 percent. Great Britain leads in this field at 15.5 percent, ahead of the USA at 12.6 percent.
China is not only the world’s second-largest Internet nation, but also the country with the largest number of mobile users in the world. According to the Ministry of Information Industry, around 530 million Chinese people use a mobile phone. For the current study, M:Metrics surveyed around 5,200 mobile subscribers between the ages of 13 and 54 in several Chinese cities.
