Paul Woodward’s Asia Media Business Blog has a post that points me to the news about the wap version of Taobao.com.

The news is inspiring and I extend my thought to something that I’ve come across and clipped last month about Google said in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Apple iPhone has generated 50 times more search request than any other mobile handset.

The mobile Taobao may be a strategic move for Alibaba to further penetrate China’s C2C market, but that m-commerce thing has never been a convincing business scene to me. I am still feeling skeptical towards any statistical data about the outpacing mobile internet usage (on a regular mobile phone and I don’t mean the GPRS usage alone) in China.

I believe the critical success factor of m-commerce lies not only in the infrastructure but also the usability of the client device. Because even a tech-savvy person like me who cannot manage to type comfortably on a regular mobile phone if it isn’t a QWERTY keypad, I don’t really see how I, supposedly should be the critical mass of the digital economy, can participate and contribute the economics.

Usability issue and its impact on m-commerce has long been discussed by the usability experts. One of the main issues is certainly the client device constraints. If entering information such as a credit card number, address and shipping information requires more than 100 key strokes, adding up the time, keypad, screen size, memory issue, and the mobile environment where the phone user is situated, the whole experience can be quite discouraging.

I also know, from a marketer perspective, to successfully deliver the whole package of rolling out a new product or new business practice, it has to be driven by the perception change before any economic demand can be generated. Take Apple iPhone and the future Google Android as an example, what they’ve brought to the market isn’t just a new user interface. Have you ever seen any Google Android demo runs on a regular mobile phone without a QWERTY keypad? What the technology giants promise for the future paradigm shift would be something about the change of operating environment and user experience triggered by the new hardware form factor. Apple iPhone is obviously a good example.

Gizmodo has a picture of the highly anticipated Apple iPhone Starbucks Quickorder System. This is what I believe will drive perception change and generate economic demand. So until I see something like this up and running, the user experience associated with m-commerce remains awfully awkward.

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