It seems that Chinese consumers are crazy about mobile phones, with over 100 million buying new devices every year. There are many reasons behind these purchases. Fashion conscious women often want the latest, most stylish models, tech junkies are always looking for the newest cutting edge features and functions, and some consumers simply enjoy extras such as digital cameras and games.

Twenty-five-year old Beijinger Xie Yi is different, however: He simply wants to send more text messages as quickly as possible. When he bought his previous phone six months ago, he wanted a mobile with strong office applications, such as Internet capability, e-mail, and Microsoft Outlook, so he spent more than US$400 to buy a smartphone from one of the world's top handset brands.

Xie soon found that sending text messages was tough work. He needed to punch the keypad many times to send simple messages to friends, and his phone frequently turned off without warning when he tried to send messages.

"The phone drove me crazy, so I had to buy a new one," says Xie, who sends more than 20 messages a day.

He is not the only consumer who prioritizes speed and convenience. The short messaging service (SMS) business has grown dramatically since 2002. Chinese mobile phone users sent 19 billion short messages in 2001, but the number shot up to 88 billion a year later.

In the first 11 months of 2005, a total of 274 billion messages were sent, and likely exceeded 300 billion for the whole year.

According to a survey by European research firm Continental Research, more than 70 per cent of mobile subscribers see SMS as a very important function.

"Many people choose to send SMS messages because it saves them money, but it has also become a kind of habit," says Yu Zhangkun, an analyst with Beijing-based consultancy Byna.

A global survey on mobile user habits by Tegic Communications, a subsidiary of AOL, shows that in the United States, 15 to 25-year olds use SMS the most, and usually combine text messages with instant messaging services to chat with friends. In Europe, people tend to send pictures or videos, and do not use text messages as much. Japanese users do not send SMS messages a lot, either, because the mobile bandwidth is good enough for them to send e-mail.

In China, however, SMS usage is very high among phone users of all ages, and text messages are used for both personal and professional purposes.

Small and big

Although messages only cost 0.10 yuan (1.2 US cents) each, high usage figures represent huge opportunities for the industry. This is particularly true for Tegic, which offers the most popular text input technology in the world.

Marketing and Communications Manager Violet Huang says that the T9 text input method is featured on 80 per cent of phones in the world in 49 languages. T9, which stands for "text on nine keys", is popular because it predicts words and phrases, which speeds up input.

Motorola's iTAP method and other input technologies only account for a small part of the market, likely because they only realized the potential too late.

Tegic also did not realize the strong demand until SMS really started taking off in 2002.

"The real turning point for text input took place in 2002. People were finding it difficult to type words quickly, so Tegic Communications started to develop phrasal text input (PTI)," Huang says.

The T9 PTI method allowed users to type set phrases together. For example, to write the Chinese pinyin sentence "xin nian kuai le," which means Happy New Year, users only needed to type the initial four letters 'xnkl' instead of all 13 .

Steve Gou, a manager at a foreign company in Beijing, says he and his colleagues like sending messages to each other, even if they are in the same room.

"If I want to share my feelings about a meeting, for example, messages are perfect," says Gou.

Tegic has made the software more convenient for Chinese users through a number of improvements for the local market. Many users are not familiar with pinyin, so they can press '6' on the keypad to replace any letters they do not know, and the software will predict what they want to say.

Most Chinese phone users send text messages, regardless of their age, so Tegic engineers also shortened the potential phrase list to six to save more on-screen space. The bigger display space is easier for older users to read.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, the world's second and fourth biggest phone manufacturers, were the first to use the PTI input method last year. They released four models to the Chinese market.

"It could take two years to see large-scale adoption of our new product in China. It will likely progress slowly," Huang says.

Tegic partnered with a local computer input technology team in September to build a joint laboratory for the development of text input technologies. It also opened an office in Hong Kong in October, 2004 to build brand awareness among Chinese consumers and form alliances with handset manufacturers.

Despite 80 per cent worldwide penetration, T9 input technology is only used by about half of all mobile phone users in China, due to the fragmented market.

Huang says Tegic attracted more domestic manufacturers to adopt T9 in 2005, however, and the penetration rate in China is expected to reach 70 per cent.

Foreign and domestic manufacturers such as Motorola, Nokia and Dopod are also paying more attention to handwriting input technologies on high-end phones. Demand for multimedia input has a lot to do with third generation mobile communications, which will be introduced soon. Tegic is also preparing to change its position in the market.

"Some people say handwriting input will put more pressure on text input, but we believe our future possibilities will be bigger," says Huang.

Tegic has positioned itself as a digital back-end firm providing essential input technologies to a number of digital devices. Content will also be expanded to include handwriting, pictures, and video.

(China Daily 01/23/2006 page7)