China, overtook the US in the third quarter of 2011, to become the world’s largest smartphone market by volume. But the development is big and is being noted that China is closing in on the 1 billion mobile connections mark. Expectedly, it will cross that mark before the end of this financial year, according to a new Wireless Intelligence report. China is a booming wireless market, but with it achieving that mark, its importance is poised to grow further.
China’s subscriber growth has even been prominent, which can be mainly credited to the threes of China’s major operators — China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. They have launched 3G networks, smartphones and other mobile data devices. at the end of 2011, 3G connections surpassed 200 million, which as per the total subscriber count is only a fifth. The driving force, however has been the low-end devices and voice search.
For the smartphones, the demand is huge and it can be evidenced by the presence of the unruly crowds that formed at Apple’s stores last week for the launch of the iPhone 4S with China Unicom. In October, Apple, said that outside US, China is its most important market for all of its products.
For the cheap smartphones, China Unicorn is using the Android platform, which is even helping the masses to shift to the smartphones at low costs. An estimation noted by Wireless Intelligence confirmed that Unicom will sell 90 million low-cost smartphones this year in addition to 60 million high-end device like the iPhone and other Android and Windows based high-end smartphones.
In an unrelated development, China has even expanded its micro-blogging ‘online accountability’ regulation. A few days ago, Chinese authorities announced that they are planning to expand their trial of the newly recently revealed ‘real name’ regulation. There are in all 16 rules designed to increase online accountability, for the countries micro-blogging websites.
This would mean that as a micro-blogger, one will have to verify their accounts with official ID under the regulation, even if they are not willing to do so.
The testing of this accountability, had started late last year in the initial cities covered by the rule; Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzen. The same was revealed by the Chinese government. According to Wang Chen, head of China’s State Council Information Office, after this testing ends, the regulation would move a step ahead to other parts of the country too. This would be yet another form of censorship of the Internet, which will have many people talking about it.
Chen explained, “Micro-blogging is a new medium that can spread information rapidly and have a big influence. It covers a wide population and can mobilize people.”
A similar step was opted by Google, for its latest social networking site, Google+. Critics had manuscripts to criticize the move from Google, to which the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt responded saying, “If You Don’t Want To Use Your Real Name, Don’t Use Google+.”
In case of China, there would be no such criticism, as China being a totalitarian, can possibly take this step in its country restrictions.