While Google has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Chinese government over its search engine product, its Android mobile platform is doing really, really well. In fact, it's poised to "leapfrog competitors to grab dominence in China," according to Richard Yu at TechCrunch, thanks in part to it being embraced by several of China's biggest mobile companies. more ›

We've been updating you with the latest on China's battle against internet pornography, but here's some good old Shanghai Daily reportage on our upstanding city's efforts against e-smut, particularly the type that drops right into the palm of your hand. Over the course of the past year, Shanghai has blocked nearly 1,900 mobile porn sites in an effort to clean up the country's new (and poorly censored) 3G networks. Some mobile customers have complained of receiving up to ten anonymous solicitations a day directing them to mobile porn, to which we say "oh, so that's what those text messages were about." more ›

How convenient! China Unicom customers can now have a payment card attached to their cellphone SIM cards, allowing them to swipe their mobile phones to pay for subway and bus fares. The transport bills will be tacked directly onto phone bills, and will receive the same discounts that regular transport cards currently get. All you have to do to get this fuction is go to a Shanghai Unicom outlet and ask for it to be added on. Unicom says these cards will soon be able to pay for shopping as well. Other carriers said they were developing similar systems. Japan and South Korea have had a system like this in place for a while now, and we're glad it's catching on in Shanghai too! Source: Shanghai Daily more ›

We're used to seeing mind boggling statistics living here in China, but this one still made our jaws drop. This country now has 703 million mobile phone users - that's double the population of the United States chatting on their cellphones. According to a report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of mobile users rose by 61.41 million in just the last six months. Meanwhile the overall number of people using phones rose by 48.99 million to 1.03 billion. Handset makers, welcome to your heaven. Source: People's Daily online more ›

CNNIC has released two reports on the status of China's mobile internet, which is used by about 117.6 million out of the current 640 million registered cellphone holders. China Web 2.0 Review summarized some of the key findings: more ›

With Christmas right around the corner, many of you will be looking for gifts for that special princess (or queen) in your life. more ›

Check out John Pasden's helpful tips here (and be jealous that your company doesn't subsidize the purchasing of cool smuggled gadgets). more ›

Xinhua has an interesting opinion piece about the recent unbanning on mobile phones and computers in Cuba. First, the title of the article: 从免于匮乏的自由开始 meaning "Starting with the freedom from want". The political significance of the phrase "freedom from want" comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union address, and comes, as we say nowadays, bundled with three other freedoms: speech and expression, religion, and fear. more ›

No, we're not talking about "personalized networks of influence" — everyone needs those. We're talking about Guanxi, the paid SMS service that allows you to send the name of a venue and it replies with the venue's address. Yesterday, for about the 27th time[1] in the past several months, we got a message supposedly from Guanxi telling us their number had changed ... again: Due to Mii rule chng,new# of Guanxi Search is 106695882929.Pls save!... more ›