[FX: Nokia ringtone]

Man with phone: “HELLO? YES, I’M ON THE TRAIN.”

You get the picture. Loud bloke talking on his mobile. Hard stares from surrounding passengers. Aren’t mobile phones annoying.

This sense of mobile phone etiquette extends to our business life too of course. In London, a mobile phone ringing mid-meeting is normally the cue for a cursory glance at the screen, a quick jab of the red button and a polite apology before said meeting resumes.

Not in Shanghai. I’ve just completed a week of interviews as part of a consumer research project, and although the subjects varied in many ways, they all shared one thing in common: they use their mobile phones like their lives depend on it. Always in the hand. Always on.

It’s not considered rude to take calls during meetings in Shanghai. Nor is it rude if these calls occasionally turn into pretty lengthy conversations. Shanghai is a city in hypergrowth, fuelled by an SME economy that relies on mobile phones to keep its 20m-strong inhabitants connected.

It’s not all talk though. If you think British teenagers are text-aholics, they’re nothing compared to the Shanghainese business folk. Rewind back to our meetings, and you’ll see most of the subjects not just checking incoming messages but replying to them at speed.

And this takes some skill too. U cnt jst txt like ths & hope 2 mk snse. Mandarin is already pretty condensed as it is (verbs don’t decline, and there’s just one word for “he”, “she” and “it” for example), so there aren’t many corners left to cut without creating some worrying ambiguity. And although Mandarin characters are more like words than characters in our own alphabet, they’re pretty complex — and therefore take several key strokes in order to complete.

For some phrases, however, the Chinese have the rest of us beat. “I luv u”? Hah. In Mandarin txt you can just type “520″, as the sounds for the numbers 5, 2 and 0 are close (enough) to the sounds for the phrase “I love you”. (It’s a pity the folk I was interviewing weren’t sending these kinds of super-abbreviated messages, or we’d have been done a lot sooner.)

This kind of innovation just goes to show how much the Shanghainese have embraced the mobile phone. Maybe we Brits just need to chill out a little? After a week here, I’ve noticed that I’m definitely using my mobile more, even in meetings. Nobody seems to mind. I’m also… hang on.

“HELLO? Yes, I’m on the Maglev. Yup. See you in 5.”

Header Image: Shanghai Sky on Flickr.

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