China is a huge mobile market and will just get bigger…at the moment mobile data revenues come mostly from SMS and ringtones, and while new services are going into the market it’s going to be a while before they make much of a dent. New mobile applications in China include 2D barcodes, instant messaging, GPS location and navigation and near-field communication mobile payments, according to Sandy Shen, China research director at Gartner in ZDNet Asia via BusinessWeek. “But despite the practical value 2D barcode and NFC payment can offer to users, she said, such applications will take a while to emerge due to “fragmentation of the technology and phone platforms, and complications in the business model”...Therefore, the majority of the carriers’ mobile data revenue will still come from SMS and ringtones/ring-back tones—at least till 2010” according to Shen. The reason is quite simple—both SMS and ringtones are cheap, easy to use and work on all phones. The majority of Chinese won’t be able to afford high-end phones with high-end applications for a while, but the sheer size of the market means that even the small percentage which can afford the top range models numbers in the tens of millions.