People are now spending more time on their smartphones surfing the internet than making actual calls. Thanks to new technologies, smartphones are becoming more multifunctional. Passing through a metro entrance, you don't need plastic cards any more. Just swipe cellphone.

"It is really convenient for me, not needing to take my wallet. It's handy to be able to just use a cellphone," a visitor named Clement Lam said.

"We needed use a lot of cards before, but now a cellphone alone can solve all the problems. If I want to buy ticket at the train station, I only need to swipe my cellphone," a visitor named Zhang Xu said. 

Japanese electronics giant Sony made the global announcement of a new smartphone using NFC technology here in China. A Sony official says it's an inevitable trend.

"It follows the way human beings communicate. It's first through voice interaction, then through text, then through photos and videos. And of course, the next phase will be data, right? Data and intelligence through sensors, through proximity, through your smartphone truly understand what you like, what you eat, where you go and what you want," Dennis Van Schie, senior VP of Sony Mobile Communications, said.

"People will have different experiences and will enjoy all those content available through smartphones. We have to utilize the opportunity to say make the market as big as possible, so that world customers will try to sell and buy the virtual goods," Suk-Chare Lee, CEO of Korea Telecom, said.

The Mobile Asia Expo will run through June 28. The 200 exhibitors are expected to draw more than 200,000 visitors.

(Xinhua News Agency June 27, 2013)