Nokia Beats iPhone to the Title of China’s Web Browsing King

Of all the smartphones being tapped, prodded and caressed in China, on which one do people spend the most time web browsing? The answer is not the iPhone, or any of the numerous Android smartphones, but the humble Nokia 5230 (pictured above).

In terms of time spent browsing the web by various smartphones, the social media mavens at Ogilvy have discerned that Nokia’s Symbian S60 5th edition-powered handset, which was launched in 2009, is the one that Chinese mobile users are using in the largest numbers.

This fits in with what we’ve heard globally already: that the Nokia N70 is actually the most popular phone in the world, once you take account of emerging markets; and that, in China, Nokia’s OVI App Store is far-and-away the primary source of mobile apps for Chinese netizens.

Before we look at the graph, Ogilvy’s Thomas Crampton has some shrewd advice on some provisos to take note of; prime among these is the caveat that:

There is a vast universe of devices not represented on this chart. Many of the cheap Chinese phones do not identify themselves when going online. This makes it hard to track usage of these devices.

Yes, the countless, fly-by-night shanzhai manufacturers, with their trompe-l’œil ‘Nokla’ faux phones, bought mainly by poorer rural folk, are likely unrecorded in these figures.

So, here’s the graph. Note that although the mighty iPhone was beaten to number two, it’s still impressive that the Apple smartphone, which is owned only by several million middle-income Chinese people, manages to rack up so much web time.

[News and graph Source: ThomasCrampton.com]