China's Ministry of Information Industry is calling for the
development of a made-in-China standard for inputting Chinese
characters for mobile phone text messaging.
The ministry has solicited opinions from dozens of mobile phone
producers and related enterprises - such as Motorola, China Mobile
and China Unicom - on the new standard.
Ninety percent of the Chinese character input standards for
mobile phone are the copyright of foreign companies, according to
Wang Lijian, secretary general of the National Information
Technology Standardization Technical Committee. Wang said that
China pays millions of dollars every year in royalty fees to use
these input standards.
Statistics show that China has more than 400 million mobile
phone users and produced some 303 million mobile phones in
2005.
Chinese companies have developed their own input software but
have found it difficult penetrating the market because mobile phone
producers are often reluctant to change partners, Wang said.
However, Chinese character input technologies developed by
foreign companies are not meeting the demands of the Chinese
market, said Gao Jingjian, head of the National Working Group on
Standards of Chinese Input Technology.
Most foreign companies use the old Chinese character standard
issued in 1980, which has only 6,763 Chinese characters. A new
standard developed by Chinese engineers includes more than 27,000
Chinese characters, Gao said.
Wang Lijian said the new input standard advocated by the
Ministry of Information Industry was developed by a company in
south China's Guangdong Province. The standard is being used
by several domestic mobile phone producers such as Konka, Gionee
and TCL, and end users have responded well to the technology.
(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2006)