I started using SMS when I was in primary school, I was using my parents’ mobile phones and their phones were still with blue/green screens or the those very tiny color screens, and they didn’t have a camera. Then when I was in junior high school, my classmates had mobile phones with bigger color screens and cameras, some of their screen can even turn 360 degrees so that they can take photos of themselves without help from others. We were still using SMS at that time, but we started using MMS. Apart from communicating through our phones, PC chatting applications like MSM, ICQ and of course, QQ were very popular as well (and QQ is still very popular in 2013).
We were using those tools simply for chatting, especially QQ, who expected that Tencent, the developer of QQ, launched Qzone, QQmail, QQ Storm Download and a series of applications and softwares so soon, almost as the same speed as the development of mobile phone systems – Symbian, Java, Windows, OS, Android, iOS. Popularity of chatting and social network applications for mobile phones rose along with the development of PC chatting tools and social network and it keeps increasing that applications like Whatsapp, Viber, Line, KakaoTalk seemed to be somehow replacing SMS, MMS and even phone calls. Do you still use SMS more than chatting applications?
Tencent launched their voice messaging application WeChat in 2011 and it wiped not only China but also other countries like India, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia ever since. Different from Siri, WeChat does not turn your voice to text and send it out, but refer to how Talkbox works, it records your voice of the message from the sender and sends it to the receiver – your contact who had been added as your friend. Soon after that, more functions were developed and users can not only text or voice message each other but also share photos, contacts and locations. Now in 2013, users can search other users around them using “look around” which uses GPS to locate smart phones, search for strangers by shaking their phones, ad contacts by scanning a QR code, share status and photos on “Moments” (similar to Facebook Timeline), and more. WeChat now has launched different versions in 19 languages included Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Bahasa (Indonesia and Melayu), Korean, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, and more. According to Tencent, registered users in Mainland China has reached 300 million and 70 million users overseas.