China sees rapid popularization of smartphones in cities

China's smartphone adoption rate ranks among the world's top five due to a rapid expansion of smartphone use in cities, said a survey released in Beijing on Tuesday. About 35 percent of urban Chinese consumers have smartphones, the third-highest level in the world. China ranks behind Singapore and Australia, with 62 percent and 37 percent respectively, according to a survey jointly conducted by Google Inc. and research service company Ipsos. The survey is based on interviews with over 30,000 people from 30 countries and regions, including 1,000 interviewees in China. According to the survey, smartphone users in China use their devices to surf the Internet (50 percent), listen to music (43 percent), send e-mails (41 percent) and search for information (37 percent). Compared to those surveyed in the United States, urban Chinese interviewees were more likely to use smartphones to access the Internet, listen to music and download programs from an application database. They use their smartphones at home, on vacation and on public transportation. One in every three people interviewed has one or two mobile phones, and the mobile phone adoption rate among urban Chinese is 97 percent, according to the survey. Statistics released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) show that the number of Chinese mobile phone users hit 952.31 million by the end of September, 102.46 million of whom were third-generation (3G) network users. According to the China Internet Networks Information Center (CNNIC), China's population of Internet users hit 485 million by the end of June this year. As of the end of 2010, the number of people accessing the Internet through mobile phones had already reached 303 million.