14 DAY TRIAL // Don't you just wish you could try out any recently released mobile phone for a couple of days and then just dump it and move on to the next one? This would be a dream come true for some people; unfortunately, not many of us will ever get to do this.
There is a certain Chinese student however, who could pretty much say that he's tried them all. The twenty-four year old Zhang Yi, a student at the Nanjing University has changed his mobile phone for 500 times during the last nine years and he claims that "I still haven't been able to find one that really suits me".
The first mobile phone he got was a present from his father in 1998, when cell phones were still pretty rare. Of course, for a person that is interested in technology, the mobile phones available then were pretty simple and boring. "The phone had limited functions. To me it was only a pager and I got rid of it in less than two months," Zhang said.
As text messaging became available in 1999, Zhang switched phones, but when later discovering that he could also change background colors and ringtones, he swapped it for another phone. Until 2002, the student owned 14 mobiles. He owned a phone for almost six months while others lasted as little as 12 hours "under his ownership". And with technology evolving at a fast pace, one can't help wanting to get the latest, smartest device.
While most Chinese mobile phone users don't change their mobile phones as often as Zhang does, it is known that people there do upgrade their mobiles more often that people from other parts of the world do. Also, the number of users that have bought a second mobile phone in China has grown to 70 million in the last year.