Qiao Xing Mobile, one of China’s leading domestic manufacturers of mobile handsets through its subsidiary CEC Telecom has launched a new mobile called the C7000A.

Yes, yes, it does all those mundane details that you expect in a mobile phone. Some will be better. You can speak, send text messages, store 500 phones number in the phone book, look at pictures and information on a large 3.0 inch LCD screen and the battery can run over 120 days in standby mode without a recharge. Good. Nay, excellent. Your phone is possibly much the same with the exception of the large screen and the long-life battery.

Now we come to the important bits, the differentiators.

With this mobile phone users will be able to perform a basic cardiograph, which they can send to doctors via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) through a GPRS network.

Doctors will then be able to provide medical advice by sending a text message back to the mobile phone. If there is a serious problem, doctors can call the patient directly.

No other phone that we know of will do that. And one can see that future models could possibly provide more information like blood pressure, temperature, whatever.

CECT has supplied an initial 200 trial units of the C7000A mobile handset to The People’s Insurance Company of China, which plans to provide the handset as a gift to its VIP customers.

Wu Zhi Yang, chairman of Qiao Xing Mobile,said, ‘We dedicate a large amount of resources to our efforts to develop highly differentiated handsets. The C7000A is a result of these efforts. It represents a breakthrough in the use of mobile handset technology. No longer are handsets only tools for entertainment and communication. We have been able to incorporate a piece of advanced medical technology that could possibly save lives.’

In fact, it may sound quirky (and you have to find a doctor who is willing to take the calls) but it has a serious and useful purpose. We will probably be seeing more mobiles like this which will be, in effect, health monitoring devices.
Source: Fox Business

According to market research firm In-Stat as many as 400,000 unlocked iPhones were running on China Mobile’s cellular network at the end of last year.

Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in 2007, and more than 10% of them are in China according to In-Stat which attributed that information to China Mobile. Somewhere around 1 million iPhones are thought to have been unlocked, and 400,000 are in China.

Apple does not want the iPhone unlocked because the company has signed lucrative revenue-sharing deals with its carrier partners that don’t apply if an iPhone is unlocked from its respective network.

In-Stat said Chinese consumers want smartphones with multimedia features and Web browsing, and the iPhone fills that need nicely. And they’re willing to pay for it: 20% of smartphones sold in China last year went for RMB4,000 ($533) or more.

Apple had at one point discussed the iPhone with China Mobile although Steve Jobs says there was just one meeting although there were rumors galore that China Mobile had rejected an offer.

The iPhone looks set to open up new areas of technology. As in creating a band — sort of musical — using collective iPhones.

On iBand there is a claim: ‘We’re playing with iAno, PocketGuitar, iPhoneSynth and BeatPhone. . . .The development of instruments for the first handheld device that let’s us create pocketsized music are important to establish this scene.’

Following that lead there is an item on PocketGuitar which lets you strum on an iPhone.
There is a YouTube with someone playing the piano on an iPhone. Yes, just one octave but pretty damn impressive.

iPhoneSynth does much the same thing but is not as sophisticated but you can see the keyboard on Flickr.

BeatPhone turns the iPhone into a drum set. Endearingly the site allows the user interface is pretty damn ugly but they are working on it.

So bet on it there will be an iPhone band making recordings within the next few months. It will probably be called The Beijing iPhone All-Stars as a tribute to the first rock group in China.

I have seen the future and it is frightening.
Source: CNet News and research.

An animal rights group has called for China to treat rats with kindness and respect. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said it has asked the Chinese government to consider animal welfare laws for rats used in laboratory experiments.

Coco Yu of PETA’s Asia-Pacific branch said in a statement: ‘Rats sing, they dream, and they express empathy for others.’

And they were also possibly, probably, responsible for the Black Death, or the Black Plague, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history. It probably began in Central Asia and spread to Europe by the late 1340s.

The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75 million people; there were as many as 50 million deaths in Europe.

The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population.

Still the rats who carried the disease probably did not mean to. Just one of those things. They were singing and dreaming as they did it. And probably expressed empathy for the victims.

The rat is one of 12 animals in the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac, which follows the lunar calendar.
Source: Yahoo

The picture is Wildlife opening the passage of life at the Qinghai-Tibet railway. In the 2006 CCTV news photos of the year it was a bronze medal winner. It was selected as one of the top 10 most memorable photographs of 2006 — and, sadly, was a PhotoShop compilation which is OK if you say so at the time.

When this was first reported on a blog and hundreds started looking at the picture for clues. The EXIF information (present on digital photographs indicated that the time when the photograph was taken was faked.

The award-winning photographer was Liu Weiqiang, who is presently the assistant director of the photography department at Daqing Evening News. He is a senior member of the Chinese Photographers Association and a special contracted Xinhua photographer.

Liu Weiqiang admitted: ‘The antelopes in the photograph are real. The overpass bridge is also real. But it was not easy to capture such a moment.’ Thus he created the picture with PhotoShop.

He said, ‘Actually, I hoped that this incident would blow up because more people will pay attention to the Tibetan antelopes.’

Which sounds sort of reasonable but at the CCTV Awards Presentation Ceremony transcript shows he said this:

Liu: ‘In the language of photography, this was an instant. It was a very brief moment. The Tibetan antelopes are smart and easily scared. When humans are even far away, they are already fleeing. When I took this photograph, I dug a hole half a meter deep and I put camouflage on top. I hid in the hole covered by camouflage. That was why the Tibetan antelopes came to pass in front of my camera. It took only a several seconds for the Tibetan antelopes to pass in front of me. But I had waited for eight days.’

You can see the picture in all its PhotoShop enhanced glory by clicking on Source.
Source: Chengdu Evening News via EastSouthWestNorth

This Vertu mobile phone, as illustrated,  is listed at RMB2.7 million in a department store in Beijing. It is one of only eight such handsets in the world, with diamonds and sapphires studded on the phone. Its title, so that you may avoid it, is Signature Cobra and it was designed by French jeweler Bouchero. The Cobra has one pear-cut diamond, one round white diamond, two emerald eyes and 439 rubies.

It is also unbelievably ugly and lacking in taste or style. On the other hand, it may work very well as a mobile phone. And it is not the most expensive mobile in the world. That is the Goldvish “Le million” which is selling for $1 million. No takers.

Note that Vertu is a division of Nokia, a Finnish company, which started life making Wellington boots. As our illustration shows, they are still available at a far more reasonable $80 a pair. They have more style than Nokia’s Vertu phone.
Source: Jongo News

Traffic police stopped a university student who was attempting to ski home on the Hanyi Expressway in Hubei province.

Police escorted the student, who was dressed in a ski outfit and boots, off the busy road. He was skiing when police stopped him.

The Jingzhou-based Changjiang University student said he decided to ski to Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, for the upcoming holiday after hearing that the expressway had been closed due to a heavy snowfall.

He should be congratulated for his original thinking and courage in the face of adverse weather conditions.
Source: China Daily

The picture is of a tourist enjoying an icicle which is part of a frozen waterfall in Mount Huangshan, east China’s Anhui Province. Extreme low temperature turned the waterfalls into spectacular icicle falls. These falls in Mount Huangshan are now crystal clear and attractive with fine weather allowing spectators.

There has always been a debate as to whether a waterfall can freeze in that freezing it becomes an icicle and not a waterfall. Take no notice of such arguments. This is a frozen waterfall.

How do waterfalls freeze? From the edges inwards … slowly. And there is another picture of an even more amazing frozen waterfall at the foot of Flame Mountain in Turufan, XinJiang province.
Source: China View

A blacksmith in southern China has built a copper microcosm of the Forbidden City, the world’s largest surviving palace complex, in his house.

Li Weimin, a Chaozhou local in Guangdong Province, has built a model that occupies almost an entire room. Li’s Forbidden City features 200 or more miniature palaces and halls, including gates as small as nails that can be opened and closed like real doors.

Using the skills he gained from his previous job, the 62-year-old retiree spent two years on the landscape, using up 30 kilograms of copper. He has also lacquered each model building with gold.

Li said his next ambition is to build a landscape depicted in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) scroll painting Along the River during the Qingming Festival. The 5.28-meter-long original features hundreds of humans and dozens of animals.
Source: CRI English

A plague of rats has been threatening many families living in the skyscrapers of Changsha, capital of Hunan province.

Many rats have been found in the apartments above the 15th story. Local experts said the rats have adapted to life in the clouds.

Getting rid of the rats has become a full-time job for some residents, who have deployed mousetraps, squirrel cages and rat poison. But the rats keep coming back.

What they need is a Pied Piper of Changsha. It is not a job that is readily filled.
Source: China Daily

There was this movie Snakes on a Plane which, as it happens, grew out of an idea on the Internet, and became relatively successful and a bit of a frightener. Now comes the possibility of a Pixar version which will be called Mice on a Plane. It will be a case of life imitating art.

U.S. Reuters reports a Chinese government emergency team being rushed onto a United Airlines jet in Beijing, after the crew notified air traffic control Sunday they found evidence of mice on board the plane.

For two days, inspectors set traps and eventually found eight mice, some dead. The live ones were sent out for lab analysis.

The good news: none of the mice tested positive for bubonic plague antigens or parasites, and airline officials say there was no damage to the plane’s wiring by nibbling mice.

United spokesperson Robin Urbanski said, ‘Our customers on this flight were always safe and unaware of the situation.’ One trusts that Robin is not stretching the truth here.

Some of the mice were found hiding in pillows. And the passengers did not notice?