At Bloomberg Businessweek, Christina Larson writes about “China’s Smartphone Generation”: heavy mobile users, from young factory workers to yuppies, of social media, dating apps and video games:
Kantar Media, a U.K.-based global consumer research and consulting firm, polled nearly 100,000 Chinese Internet users about their online habits and preferences in 2012 and just released its analysis of the study: 59 percent of respondents said that online chat and dating were their favorite uses of the mobile Internet, while 43 percent described themselves as “frequent” users of social media. Notably, the number of Chinese netizens who claimed they had visited a social media site in the past day was higher among mobile Internet users (32 percent) than among all netizens (26 percent). Weixin (“WeChat”), Tencent’s popular social-media app, is almost exclusively used on smartphones and tablets.
Megacity commutes are also correlated with more time online. In 2012, Chinese commuters who travelled more than one hour to work were three times as likely to go online daily as those whose commutes were under a half hour. […] [Source]
Beijing’s China Internet Network Information Center reported last week that the country now has 464 million mobile Internet users, with the total number of people online reaching 591 million. Tech In Asia has more figures on the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in China, with graphs and detailed breakdown:
Analytics firm Flurry has some new stats out for the China market. The company says it measured 261.33 million active smartphones and tablets in China in its most recent survey. Of those, 65 percent are Android devices, while the rest are on iOS.
[…] Turning to look at the broader China market, the country now has 24 percent of the world’s smart device users. After a huge growth spurt earlier this year, China’s adoption of smartphones and tablets has flattened out a bit and is now in-line with the global average growth rate. [Source]
