News sent to your mobile phone
The local information service that you access from using your mobile’s SMS, like Shanghai’s Guanxi service, will soon be coming to Kunming. Unfortunately, as the city is slightly behind Shanghai in the international metropolis stakes, they will only be offering the service in Chinese, but it will work the same way. Send an SMS with the name of a restaurant, a company or even a short description (Kunming driving school) and you’ll get the contact details sent back to you. The number, when the service is launched later this year, will be 50120.
If you want some mobile phone excitment to tide you over, there is the Yunnan news-to-phone service which has only been around for a couple months. Known as Spring City Mobile News, it has been put together by the Yunnan Daily, with content from its own paper as well as Spring City Evening News, Dianchi Lake Morning Post, Yunnan Economic Daily and others.
News content covers Yunnan, China and international stories, as well as finance, sports, and entertainment, and costs RMB 5 per month. Send the message “01″ to the number “08878″ to subscribe. Subscribers can also customize the service by choosing different versions depending on preference (”best of”, “entertainment” etc).
There are over 8,700,000 mobile users in Yunnan province as of the end of 2005, a phone for one in five of Yunnan’s population.
The company behind the SMS information service is DNS (新网互联), www.dns.com.cn [in Chinese].
Information about the news-to-phone service is in this Yunnan Daily article. [in Chinese]
Spring City Mobile News《春城手机报》 chun1 cheng2 shou3 ji1 bao4
