

Why has Japan had better mobile phones than the United States? - rpsubhub
http://www.quora.com/Historically-why-has-Japan-had-better-mobile-phones-and-better-mobile-internet-access-than-the-United-States/answer/Benedict-Evans

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dotBen
The US market is as unique as the Japanese _(for different reasons)_. And when
I arrived in US from UK in 2006 I was staggered at how behind the phone
technology was.

In addition to the points raised in the Quora link, I think a lot of the
reason US didn't innovate was because other than the NE corridor there isn't a
public transport culture like there is in Japan and Europe - where people will
sit on a train for 45 minutes and watch TV or engage with apps _(and thus be
prepared to pay for them)_.

Sure the iPhone and Android have bought app culture to the US but I bet the
amount of engagement they receive is much shorter than in Europe and Asia.

Here in the US I think a lot of Apps are task oriented - "I want to find a
restaurant nearby"... 30 seconds later the app is closed and done. In Europe I
might be on a train for half an hour so I'll engage with a video-on-demand
app... I'll watch 5 news clips and read two articles which might be 10minutes
+ usage.

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jwwest
This may have been true in the 90s/early 00s, but I'm not sure if it is
anymore.

During a trip to Tokyo a few years back, I got to see some of the "advanced"
phones up close: big, clunky, and plastic. The majority of phones are flip,
with very few smart phone users.

There is a big difference in what the Japanese want out of phones for sure
though. While we're fixated on Internet access and applications to pass the
time, the biggest seller of phones in Japan is the ability to watch TV through
1seg: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-seg>

Wikipedia has another really interesting article on cell phone culture in
Japan: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_mobile_phone_culture>

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T-R
I'd argue it's still true, but to a lesser degree. In addition to 1seg, I
think FeliCa's a big one.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa>

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sudont
This makes no sense.

NTT is a telecom, and analogous to one of our companies: Verizon. They specify
things to all manufacturers too, but things like V-Cast and buttons that
"accidentally" launch the internet on their phones.

I think this has less to do with the "closed model" Evans idolizes, and more
with a culture that embraces technical innovation, even at the corporate
level. (Remember, he's ex telecom.)

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dotBen
No, you're not comparing apples to apples.

What NTTDoCoMo is specify _everything_ from the electronics through to the
user experience. In other words it is a holistic approach.

What Verizon does is say to the handset OEMs "slap on some extra icons,
applications and a button to your existing experience" if you want to get your
phones on our network. It's anything but a holistic approach and simply
degrades the original experience the OEM/OS provider made.

As referenced in the Quora answer, the carriers in Japan are making good ARPUs
and so it is in their interest to be providing the end user with an overall
good experience.

Verizon, like all of the carriers in the US market, makes slim ARPUs and so
from a corporate perspective they are more incentivized to tack on up-sells to
increase ARPU which is exactly what all the V-Cast stuff is about.

In many ways it's similar to the Apple experience vs Dell (+ all the pre-
installed bloatware) experience.

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donw
I live in Tokyo, as the CTO for a local startup.

Before the iPhone, Japanese mobiles were definitely a step ahead, but now that
the iPhone, and its Android competition, are thriving around the world,
everything that isn't one of the above feels about ten years behind.

Classic Japanese mobile phones don't support Javascript. Or cookies. A large
number of handsets don't allow images at all on pages with SSL, or stylesheets
of any kind -- you have to specify CSS in-line, with the 'style' attribute on
each element you want to style.

Native apps exist, but if you want to develop them, be prepared to spend a
shocking pile of money.

None of this holds for the iPhone or Android-derived devices over here, but
those are no better then their foreign counterparts.

In terms of features, the only truly useful thing that I can think of that
Japanese mobiles have is mobile Suica -- it's nice to be able to have your
commuter pass integrated with your phone. Charging it up with cash can be a
pain in the ass, as the web-based tools are crap, but it's nice nonetheless.

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ahi
I read an article years ago, which I can't seem to find, that gave a
completely different reason for this phenomenon. Real estate is so expensive
that large numbers of teens and twenty somethings have no hope of moving out
of their parents' apartment even if they are working. This means there is an
entire demographic with plenty of cash to spend on high end (preferably
compact) technology. I have no way of knowing if this is actually the case,
but I don't think the OP does either.

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somabc
For people arguing that Japanese phones are not very good, what would you say
about the European Market vs the USA?

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geuis
Given the time period mentioned in the quora post, yes the Japanese (at least
in Tokyo) had more advanced phones than we readily had access to here in the
US until 2007. However, I was in Japan a little over a year ago, and I can
tell you affirmatively that the common phones people were using were less-
advanced than my iPhone 3G at the time.

The typical phone was a long skinny thing with a tiny elongated screen and
dozens of impossibly tiny buttons crammed together to make something like a
keyboard. They had cameras of inferior quality, inferior internet access, etc.
I'll grant that some of their phones had things like NFC, but that's the
exception that proves the rule. And my, was my little touchscreen phone
popular with the ladies.

Its hard to disagree that Apple alone has completely shaped what it means to
be a smartphone in the last 4 years. Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone 7 did
not exist before iOS came out. Android _has_ become the marginal market leader
in the last 6 months or so in terms of overall phones sold, but that's a
fragmented OS market now. The WebOS phones failed, and WP7(a pretty cool OS,
imho) is having trouble getting traction. Right now, biggest and most unified
smart phone market is simply iOS.

But to put everything into perspective, the model described by in the QP is
remarkably similar to Apple's model in many ways. About 10 years ago, DoCoMo
said "these are the specs that you will support on your phones", and because
DoCoMo had the marketshare of customers, that's what happened. In the US, you
don't see a red Verizon logo on the iPhone, right? Apple controls the software
and hardware, aka "the specs" of their phones. They have dictated what the
carriers will support for things like Visual Voicemail.

The sad part is that DoCoMo seems to have been innovating for a while, which
helped give Japan (Tokyo?) the cache of having the best phones in the world.
However, that hasn't been true for a long time and now the most popular phones
in Japan are iPhones.

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tlear
I had a pretty different experience, I been to Japan probably around 7 times
over last 10 years. Last couple times (within last 2 years) IPhone became big,
but.. many people actually own 2 phones if they have iphone. I think huge
reason is that in packed subway you want to be able to type with one hand.
Other stuff like TV etc is also quite important.

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georgieporgie
Meh. I spent a lot of time shopping for mobile phones in Japan last year.
_Nothing_ was even close to the iPhone (other than the iPhone).

Some aspects of Japanese cell phones were better than some aspects of American
phones. Simplifying it to DoCoMo having a lot of sway is, IMO, ignoring an
awful lot. Tokyo has tremendous population density. Demand was high for mobile
Internet access because not everyone has the space for a home computer, and
people spend a lot of time out and about. People send emails like mad because
it's cheaper and because it's more polite than yelling into your handset while
on the train. Payment chips got integrated because the local McDonald's might
pass a hundred times the number of customers per day than your local American
one.

Of all the things driving Japanese cell phone technology, the ones listed seem
pretty minor. Give that sort of focused demand to US carriers and I think
you'd see far faster adoption of specific technologies.

By the way, my Japanese cell phone has a built-in TV receiver _and_ recorder.
And as near as I can tell, SoftBank voicemail isn't voicemail at all; it's an
actual answering machine built into my handset. Weird.

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sliverstorm
That was pretty much my experience when I visited the place in the summer of
2005. I remember they were _just_ introducing camera phones, and thinking to
myself, hasn't the US had camera phones for like 3-4 years now?

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T-R
My impression has been exactly the opposite - aside from full-internet on
smartphones (not to say it isn't a big deal), new features in the US lag by
something like 5 to 10 years. QR code reading and easy contact transfer(like
赤外線) still aren't out-of-the-box features (hacked in by third party software
like Bump), and most Americans don't know what a QR code is. We still can't
pay for things at the grocery store or buy train tickets with a cell phone,
whereas Japan has had FeliCa Mobile for 7 years now. Live TV on a cell phone
is also non-existent in the US. In Japan, these are all so common that they're
available on the free-with-plan phones.

Also, according to the Japanese Wikipedia article, the first camera phone was
DDI(Wilcom)'s VP-210 in 1999, and they exploded in popularity with Sharp's
J-SH04 on J-Phone(Softbank) in 2000.[1] The US, by contrast, got their first
camera phone in 2002.

[1] <http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/カメラ付き携帯電話>

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mullr
QR Code support seems like a software and cultural issue; they have public
awareness in Japan and are thus useful. But it's not like most phones don't
have the horsepower to read the things.

TV on phones is a matter of the local broadcast technology making it easier to
support smaller recievers (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg>). And also
(again) a cultural issue; what's the use case for watching TV on your phone in
the states? In Japan, it's so you can watch baseball when you're on the train.

But I'm with you about payment. I got a special iPhone case with a slot for my
train card (icoca) just so I could feel modern. :)

