Mobile Messaging Fuels China's Top Three Web Portals
China's top three Web portals - Sina.com, Sohu.com and NetEase.com - have reported higher revenues and narrower losses due to mobile messaging. Industry experts estimate the number of cell-phone users in China is three times larger than that of Internet users. China's wireless growth rate is the largest in the world. With Short Messaging Services, the portals have a market potential of 160 mobile phone users. Whereas most of the portals' revenues now come from online advertising, officials are expecting that to change to a one-third split among wireless services, advertising and corporate services. However, mobile giants, including China Telecom and China Mobile, are expected to guard mobile messaging from providing sufficient revenues to portals

Well, that's not a big shock. Here's a China Telecom fixed line SMS phone. Popularity of SMS in China is so high, and computers/internet use low, that these messaging machines are catching on. Realize now, that it's even more of a pain-in-the-ass to construct and send an SMS message in chinese than in english. My friend in Japan showed me the mulitple steps you need to go through to get a single katagana character on your Japanese i-mode display. Same in chinese, except, they are using something more like kanji characters (of which there are somthing like 200,000)! And still it prospers. I remember years ago somebody explaining to me that in Asia the fax machine would always be perferable to email due to the whole ASCII aspect of computers. Not any more. They figured that out, which, if you ever watched somebody type on a chinese/english keyboard you can see.