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.
Does that mean that TOR is available for mobile phones now too?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Most of the developing nations don't have infrastructure for descent wired connectivity. Satellite/Mobile is quick and cheap way out.
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.
Monstar L