China Has More People Going Online With a Mobile Device Than a PC

An anonymous reader points out that even though China's internet adoption rate is the lowest it's been in 8 years, the number of people surfing the net from a mobile device has never been higher. "The number of China's internet users going online with a mobile device — such as a smartphone or tablet — has overtaken those doing so with a personal computer (PC) for the first time, said the official China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) on Monday. China's total number of internet users crept up 2.3 percent to 632 million by the end of June, from 618 million at the end of 2013, said CNNIC's internet development statistics report. Of those, 527 million — or 83 percent — went online via mobile. Those doing so with a PC made up 81 percent the total. China is the largest smartphone market in the world, and by 2018 is likely to account for nearly one-third of the expected 1.8 billion smartphones shipped that year, according to data firm IDC.

Comments

So

[StripedCow]

Does that mean that TOR is available for mobile phones now too?

Re:So

[cyfer2000]

The Great fireWall can dynamically detect Tor traffic and block them, think something smarter NOW please.

Re:So

[Ken_g6]

I found an Android app for Tor about a year ago. Haven't checked since.

Long live the 'desktop' and mobile 'laptop'.

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know this is the future, but a scary one. Webapps, 'cloud' with insane caps, and closed ecosystems.

Re:Long live the 'desktop' and mobile 'laptop'.

[s.petry]

Partial truth, but nobody has mentioned the most obvious reason for this to be true in China. Money! PCs in the US and Europe are pretty cheap, but not in China. Remember that the cost of a PC is not just in capital, but a support structure. Houses in China are rare, apartments dominate the landscape so the few that can afford them may not have a place to put them. Remember that these are not large apartments. If you have very little disposable income, you are going to purchase _either_ a phone phone or a PC. Not both. You also need to pay for support for the hardware, operating system, and purchase applications (rare in China I agree, but the Government there does have some rules it can choose to enforce). This is why computer boutiques are common in all over Asia, not just China. PCs are expensive, phones are cheap.

I agreed in part because phones are the future landscape for Internet use by consumers. In fact that "future" is already prevalent. In business, absolutely not with current technology. Anyone actually working in IT today requires fast processing and multiple displays. Tablets are not powerful enough for a developer today, which pushes phones further out. If phones are ever developed enough to take over business space, they won't be considered phones any longer. Angry birds works fine on a Phone, running a large mysql query and working with the data not so much (let alone trying to compile a client that does this, or running a mysql server for more than a few clients).

Re:Long live the 'desktop' and mobile 'laptop'.

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that is the root cause?

I guess from all the time you spent in China you failed to notice something subtle yet important.
There was never really an infrastructure build-out for land based services (phone/tv).

Since they never wired for cable TV/Home phones how do you suppose they get home-internet working?

Cell phones are everywhere since they are fairly cheap and the primary way they have phone service (unless you want to stand in line at the post office).

PS
I think you are also off on the apartment sizes.
I own what was once a state-owned apartment in a decent sized Chinese city (pop ~ 4.7 Million).

The place has two bedrooms with a combined tv/dining room. Both bedrooms are reasonably sized and both have queen sized beds with space for a desk and chair.

I don't see why they cant put a computer on the desks? Now if I had a computer in my Chinese apartment i'm unsure where i would plug it in for internet access as there are no telephone/cable jacks.

Propaganda for Chinese cell manufacturers?

[timrod]

China has a whole bunch of in-state manufacturers that are backed by their government. I'm sure it's also a lot easier for their government to control what goes on with cell phones, because they either own the providers or have total control over their activities. This almost sounds like a "Everyone's doing it, so should you!" kind of thing to get more people to buy state-controlled phones.

It's all about the input

[0xdeaddead]

and android phones support enough chinese input methods which makes them popular.

Ever use a computer with some kind of Chinese input? It's a nightmare.

Re:It's all about the input

[timrod]

I've never used Chinese input, but I have used Japanese input before via Google IME when I was trying to learn Japanese (I never succeeded but I'm gonna go back to it). I think doing non-Western languages on a computer is a pain no matter how you do it. For instance, instead of having a simple button that toggles hiragana and katakana, you had to highlight the text you wanted to switch to katakana (hiragana was on by default) and press F8 to switch it. I don't think there is a single IME out there that has a simple toggle switch.. at least, none that I know of.

The place it really becomes a problem (and this would be worse for Chinese than Japanese because Chinese is 100% kanji) is when you have a kanji that has an extremely common pronunciation. There are about a hundred different kanji, some of which are surprisingly common in Japanese, that all share one pronunciation (I think it was "fu" but I can't remember anymore) and Google's IME gives you a drop-down list of all of those kanji if you type in the pronunciation.

There is actually a movement in Japan to this day (that started in the Meiji period) to drop kanji from the language entirely and use the hiragana pronunciation instead, and one of the reasons for this is that hundred-kanji pileup.

Mobile OS market shares?

[Mojo66]

Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention individual numbers, but given that iOS dominates the mobile internet, maybe this is due to Apple's expansion into China.

Leveling off surprisingly low

[timeOday]

It's 2014 so the Internet has been around a long time and it's not surprising growth is slowing. What surprises me is that according to the article there are only 632 million Internet users in China in June, whereas the total population of 1.35 billion is over twice that number. In other words, most people in China do not access the Internet - only 47%. In the US the figure is 87%.

Re:China has an internet?

[0xdeaddead]

for normal people? 2003 or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But it's crony captalisim at it's best. First they allow access to a western site to get the feel of it, then they have uncle at the military have the site blocked. Then Jr creates a clone version of that site. The pirate site then gets popular since you can't access the real site, and well billion + people means millions of users which means nice watch, a couple of apartments and shark fin soup for uncle.

It's a joke.

Same is true for all developing countries

[blackmesadude]

Most of the developing nations don't have infrastructure for descent wired connectivity. Satellite/Mobile is quick and cheap way out.

Re:Symantics

[QilessQi]

Agreed. "PC" is also apt to be confused with a Windows PC.
A better term would have been "desktop system" vs "mobile system".

Re:China has an internet?

[HeckRuler]

It's a joke.

Whoa there, it turns "innovation", "IP", "the free market", and "network neutrality" into sad jokes. And there's not a lot of respect for that sort of stuff in China. The country is still fairly repressive by modern standards.

But it very much funnels users and money back towards China. This sort of thing will not be fought by the officials in China. The minor officials get shark-fin soup, so they're all for it. But the higher ups like it just the same as it keep money from leaving the country. It's essentially protectionism.

China is not alone

[antifoidulus]

Even in more developed countries there are often times more people using cell phones to access the internet than PCs. For instance Japan(article is a bit old, but I don't see the trend reversing). One of the big reasons is that in a lot of countries people don't take work home. If you don't take work home, then there isn't nearly as much of an impetus to buy a PC and use it to access the internet.