By Huang Xin

In this year, new applications have been emerging one after another in the information industry, and new markets have been generated. For examples, the re-combination of existing technologies, such as virtualization and distributed computing, has laid the foundation for the materialization of the concept of cloud computing; the popularization of intelligent terminals provides software service with a wider field of application and accelerates the further development of the mobile internet; the group buying pattern has started the era of O2O (online to offline)...

In the Annual Economy Meeting of China's Information Industry 2011 held recently, Zhou Zixue, chief economist of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, points out that China's information industry in the past few years has gone through a development process that has witnessed the greatest changes and most extensive development, with fundamental improvement in terms of industrial scale, profitability, industrial structure, innovation capability, and international status and competitiveness. The information industry has entered a stage of integration. Continuous emergence of new technologies and new applications generates new markets and brings about highly integrated new patterns.

App competition on smart phones

With larger screens, more functions, and lower price, smart phones of about RMB 1,000 Yuan are bringing smart phones into common households with their high quality and inexpensive price. As price and hardware of smart phones are getting closer, application experience is becoming the key of contention. "For example, people often use smart phones for micro-blogging, so the text input and photo-taking experiences are the most important user experiences. Therefore, we will enhance the photography function of the mobile phone", said Liu Jun, senior vice president of Lenovo Group and president of Lenovo MIDH Group.

China is now the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. In 2010, China produced 998 million units of mobile phones, more than 60 percent of the total global production volume, with the number of mobile phone users in China increasing by 10 percent over the previous year. "Of all the phones produced, smart phones have been growing at the fastest pace and become the hot spot of the market", said Zhao Bo, deputy director of the Electronic Information Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. According to him, medium- to low-end smart phones are sought popular among users, and the configurations of such products keep improving. Large screen and high-speed processor are becoming the development trend of smart phones. User experience is an important approach for smart phones to attract consumers.

Zhao Bo also points out that innovations in system, products, business, and contents service are needed in order to accelerate the development of smart phones; terminals manufacturers, software companies, operators, and internet enterprises should be encouraged to strengthen cooperation in such aspects as software and hardware matching, operation promotion, and application service, so as to promote the vertical integration of the industrial chain; mobile phone companies should invest more in the R&D of core technologies and concentrate efforts to break technology bottlenecks so as take independent possession of terminal software and hardware key technologies and build up a complete smart phones industrial chain. 

The ubiquitous mobile internet

You are playing a game on your tablet computer at home when suddenly you need to hurry for a meeting. On your way, you can call out the tablet game and continue to play it on your mobile phone from where you have left it. "The second-generation LE products support functions like this, and we call it cross-screen inter-visit and task transference", said Liu Jun.

At the end of November, Lenovo introduced a series of mobile terminals, including new smart phones, tablet computers, personal computers, and smart TV LE terminals.  On top of that, Lenovo also introduced a full "personal cloud" solution that is based on the Lenovo Cloud kernel, and announced the development strategy of "openness, safety, localness, and social networking" for the Lenovo store, perfectly integrating its four terminals with the Lenovo Cloud service. This completed Lenovo's deployment in hardware, software, and the cloud. Also, Lenovo offers a series of preferential policies to developers in such aspects as technology, capital, platform, and value-added service.

Yang Yuanqing, chairman of the board and CEO of Lenovo Group, put it this way: "We will provide users with diversified products and make it easier to share information and sync apps among different devices". In the mobile internet era, PC is no longer the only terminal that can be connected to the internet. There are a wide variety of terminals available now. The sales of smart phones, tablet computers, electronic books, and all kinds of new internet terminals have been growing rapidly, and ownership and popularity rate have increased significantly. Thanks to daily improving of mobile communication technologies, any device can connect to the internet anytime and anywhere.

Currently, China's mobile internet is equipped with the foundation for further leap-forward development, 3G network coverage is widening with every passing day, breakthroughs have been made in the R&D of next-generation mobile communication technologies, innovations in mobile internet technologies and business are energetic, and the environment of the mobile internet has been markedly improved. According to a report published by CCID Think Tank, the number of mobile internet subscribers in China had reached 318 million in the first half of the year, and is expected to exceed 480 million in 2012. Luo Wen, president of CCID Group, even predicts that the number of subscribers of the mobile internet will exceed that of the conventional internet in the next 5 years.