July 5 Roundup

I recently returned from a 10 day vacation in China and it seems everywhere I looked someone was using their cellphone with text messaging looking likeit was a big part of everyday mobility. My teenaged niece came up to Shanghai from Guangzhou and seemed to be getting messages left and right. I should have asked her to show me how she used her handset as I assume she texts in Chinese characters.

The new mobile subscriber numbers China Mobile is putting up is mind-boggling, and it's hard to fathom that the vast majority of the population are probably still not yet mobile. Given that China has 1.4 billion people, give or take a million or two, it's easy to see why the market potential is enormous.

On the topic of China's potential, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney and Think Equity Partners analyst Jonathan Hoopes comment in E-Commerce Times about Research in Motion getting the green light to sell BlackBerries in China. I wonder how pervasive email usage is?

In addition, Kevin Wang at iSuppli forecasts that China’s mobile navigation market is to grow more than 10-Fold by 2011. Mobile content and in this specific case, GPS location based services, look extremely promising as I'm guessing more people will rely on mobile devices than PCs to get information, such as in Japan.

Analysts in the news for July 5:

• Lance Wilson at ABI Research about My iPhone Odyssey - Day 2
• Thomas Husson at JupiterResearch about Internet TV surfing
• Bena Roberts at BKI Media about Tea with InfoSpace’s Simon Craddock
• Jonathan Arber at Ovum, Thomas Husson at JupiterResearch and Paul Skeldon at Juniper Research via silicon.com about How shiny is the iPhone's halo?
• Pyramid Research analyst Sergio Cruz via cellular-news about Four markets to represent 70-80% of Nokia Siemens Network's LatAm revs in 2007
• Mike Goodman at Yankee GroupTechNewsWorld about Tech on the Run