Met a friend who works at Shanghai Academic of Social Sciences today. I think he can be quite helpful. He has sent me a copy of a report they did not only ago on “mobile TV” in Shanghai, i.e. TVs in cabs and on the subway etc. Plus one of his colleagues used to work in the Wujiaochang Street Office. Maybe they can make an introduction for us, which would help us a lot!

We also spoke about why screen devices might be so much more popular on the Shanghai subway than the London Tube. One reason I had thought of before was that the physically compact nature of Chinese characters means you can get a lot more content on a screen than you can on a Western equivalent. You don’t really need anything as big as a Kindle or an I-Pad in China. I had thought the devices must be cheap. But according to my friend, the PSPs that they use here are all imported and cost about 2000 RMB — not cheap at all! Another important difference is the absence of free newspapers like Metro or the Evening Standard.

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