The mobile phone man
According to statistics from China's telecoms regulator MII (Ministry of Information Industry), there are over 426 million mobile phone users in China, the biggest user group in the whole world. The cover story of the latest New Weekly is all about this group.
The feature includes interviews with nine people who apparently represent the diverse uses mobile-obsessed urban Chinese have for their phones:
Li Su, a mobile Internet fanatic, often uses the Internet on her mobile. She has followed a basketball match on her phone. She would like to be able to write a 2,000 character blog post and publish it just using her mobile.
Wu Guohua, a manager of a household appliance retail chain, collects different kinds of mobile phones as a hobby. He has gathered more than 30 phones from 1995, and kept them carefully. Most of them still can be used.
Wang Xu, a postgraduate student, likes to disassemble phones to see how they work.
Hua Feng has changed his mobile phone every month since 2002. "Aside from food, I spend almost all my money on changing phones."
Yin Xiaobei and Wu Ying are lovers who like to send each other text messages by mobile phone, sometimes as many as 3,000 a month. They also quarrel by SMS.
Li Fang is a freelance photographer who owns 20 mobile phones: he gives different mobile phone numbers to different girls he meets.
This rather fluffy feature article was sponsored by Motorola.
