A 45-year-old woman died recently after walking off a 20-meter bridge onto a river bank in the Jiangjing district of Chongqing, apparently because she was distracted by the text messages on her cell phone. more ›

If a Hello Kitty phone cover just isn't enough (and how could it be?), here's a new phone that will bring you closer than ever to the salutational cat. That's right. A Hello Kitty that pops open into a cell phone. It's practically a transformer. more ›

Awww, how adorable! From another random shanzhai technology company comes this actually well thought out Winnie the Pooh-themed cellphone. more ›

Here we have it: the most ostentatious religious-themed cellphone in China! more ›

• One of the more intriguing art/food destinations has just opened up: The Factory (at 1933), which is billing itself as a lab of sorts for Shanghai's young artists and will have a weekly-changing reasonably affordable menu. [Urbanatomy]
• Uh oh, apparently cellphone eavesdropping tools are being sold around town that could let you listen in on someone's every call, as well as send and receive their text messages. Talk about frightening! [Sinosplice]
• Ford's Asia Pacific VP, John Parker, tells BBC why he's "cautiously optimistic" about the car market in China at the Shanghai Auto Show. [BBC]

Kaiser Kuo of Youku Buzz writes:

Here’s a short video of a download speed test of China Telecom’s trial 3G wireless network, which is on the CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO standard. (We usually hear about China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network, foisted on them by regulators against their wishes, and the “European” standard WCDMA network that will be operated by China Netcom). more ›

The exploding cellphone incident in Guangzhou, which killed a young man at a Lenovo store, may have had some of us scrambling to make sure our cellphone batteries weren't going to be the end of us too. more ›

As the Financial Times reported, April 1 was the day that China Mobile started trials of its homegrown 3G wireless technology in eight major cities, with about 60,000 customers. more ›

The iPhone will be available in Asia sometime in the earlier half of this year (although nobody seems to know exactly when yet), and while Apple's been dragging its feet over bringing the phone here, some enterprising Chinese company has already come up with another clone, the HiPhone (not to be confused with the Meizu Minione), and from what we hear so far, it's not too bad for a clone! In fact, this German geek was so impressed by the phone he decided to do a four-part video review of it to cover everything from the box to the OS, the messaging and the multimedia systems. (We love how the packaging of the phone screams, "Innovation changes the future!") more ›

You can pluck a Chinese patient away from the hospital, but you will never snatch his cell phone away from him! Photo from Tim Johnson of China Rises. Share with us how you see Shanghai, or China! Simply post your photos on Flickr, tag them with "shanghaiist", and we'll select one favorite image per day. Or you can simply email your photos to photos[at]shanghaiist.com.... more ›

If you thought mooncakes were only for the old-fashioned, think again. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and even tech companies (yes, you heard that right!) have all jumped onto the bandwagon, creating a bewildering array of mooncakes in the market with ever bolder and imaginative fillings, all in the hopes of capturing a bigger slice of the market. For the sweet-toothed, check out these multi-coloured ice-cream moon cakes from Häagen-Dazs, which you can get now at the Parkson supermarket (at Shanxi Nanlu subway), but if you do decide to go, brace yourself for the crazy queues!
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Recently while out of town, our landlord called us on our cell phone to inform us that he wanted his apartment back ASAP. Why, we asked? He wanted to renovate it, he said, but we were not convinced. You see, the few of us have been living in this apartment for coming to 3 years now, and there was this implicit agreement that we could stay on for as long as we liked, so some time back we didn't sign any lease with him, but continued to dutifully pay our rent each month (no delays) as we have done for such a long time. more ›

Remember the really creepy lovelorn Japanese man, Saitou Takuya (斋藤卓也) who was so madly in love with a girl he saw on the Beijing subway that he put up a video of her on the internet that he secretly took of her, asking people to help him find her? A number of commenters did wonder aloud if the whole thing was a spoof, but apparently not. more ›

Security guards in a Suzhou housing complex found a nude man lying dead on a platform on the second floor while on their regular walkabouts. Police found that the man, surnamed Geng, was a tenant on the 12th floor of the complex and was working in a sauna in the neighbourhood. The night before, a woman living on the 16th floor returned home at around 3am in the morning, only to discover there was an unwelcome visitor in her bathroom, and he was nude. Naturally she screamed at the top of her lungs and ran out. Later, she discovered that her cell phone was still in the bathroom and when she went back in again (we think that's such a strange thing to do given the circumstances!), the man was gone. Apparently, her scream had gotten her peeping tom into a fluster, and he fell to his death. more ›

A 29 year old Japanese man, Saitou Takuya (斋藤卓也) who is madly in love (so he thinks) with a girl he saw on the Beijing subway has put up a video of her (that he secretly took with his cell phone, he admits) and asked the public to help him in his search for her. He looks and sounds very desperate to find her in his video uploaded on Youku (we are beginning to LOVE this website!) which includes the following message: more ›

If you are a text message addict like us — 10 fens do add up fast, we have some good news for you. For a limited time, China Mobile (all you 134-139, 158, 159 people) is offering free SMS service with just one string attached: download its new instant messenger client, 飞信/Feixin/Fetion (Chinese for “flymail”). The IM, at least in its current incarnation is nothing to crow about, but it does have one ass kicking feature you won’t find in MSN, Gtalk or QQ: Free SMS within the China Mobile network, PC to mobile, mobile to PC, and of course mobile to mobile. Download the PC client here, and mobile client here (under your cell phone’s brand and model number). Mac fanboys need not despair, pop in a virtualization/emulation software and you can get in on the free loving too. more ›

The industry is trying to make 3G services available in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics so that half a billion cell phone subscribers and millions of visitors can stream and download small screen clips of Yao Ming slam dunking his way to gold medal glory. more ›

Attendance falling at your local place of worship? Loyal herd looking elsewhere for spiritual direction? Have a carnival! That'll win 'em back. If only the Pope had thought of it ... like the Shanghai Xuhui District Tourist Bureau did. It's annual Longhua Temple Festival runs until May 7th, meaning you have one weekend left to catch all the fun. more ›

Jia Zhangke’s Golden Lion-award-winning Still Life (in Chinese, Sanxia Haoren, or "The Good People of the Three Gorges") isn’t quite the masterpiece that we’ve come to expect from the man responsible for the pitch-perfect The World (2004) or Platform (2000). But save for a few minor hiccups, it comes awfully close. more ›

Torontoist has some awesome, cutting edge news: A movie is being made about a gay hockey player - filmmakers even got approval from the NHL and the Toronto Maple Leafs! Also awesome: Toronto's "Do the Sneeze Sleeve Campaign". And most awesome is this dreamy photograph of Toronto's skyline in fog. more ›

COLOR: PINE GREEN/GREY GRANITE more ›

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So far, China Mobile hasn’t commented on the breach, calls to customer service reps received the usual “we aren’t aware of any such attack” treatment. more ›

Shanghaiist was thinking about how to characterize a movie like this: We mulled over “worst movie we’ve ever seen,” and thought this too harsh, as there are probably loads of worse movies that we’ve seen but have repressed the memory of. And we hope the same happens with this movie. more ›

Mobile phone madness more ›

There are many remarkable things in Xi'an, and we don't just mean the super-sized rats and colorful mobile phones. The first ever cell (mobile) phone film festival (or in Chinese here) is being held in Xi'an in September. Entries were being accepted as of Juy 8 and will continue on until August 25. The head of the jury is the Hong Kong indie film director Fruit Chan (陈果). more ›

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddie for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bid's Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. more ›

Have we mentioned China Unicom is about to launch a pushmail service dubbed the “RedBerry”? Oh yeah, we have, here, here and here. This Shanghaiist went so far as calling it a worthy challenger to the BlackBerry. But, now we aren’t so sure. Sage Brennan from Pacific Epoch uncovered this interesting, albeit somewhat disturbing tidbit: more ›

This just came in to our news desk: WiFi cell phone will soon make their debut in Shanghai. Kick ass! Errrh … only one question, what exactly is a wifi cell phone? So, we took some time out from gawking at hot chicks online and went to work. more ›