Japan phone manufacturers eye releasing models stateside
By Sean P. Aune
Japan has always run ahead of other parts of the world in cellphone technology, yet their phones have never caught on in other parts of the world. If a consortium of Japanese cell phone manufacturers has its way, that’s all about to change.
Japanese cell phones (also known as keitai there) have always run ahead of phones in other parts of the world, getting email in 1999, hitting 3G speeds in 2001, getting cameras in 2002 and so on. The devices have also become the number one way that residents access the Internet, beating out your standard computers. They are such a ubiquitos feature of the landscape, there is even a Wikipedia entry for “Japanese mobile phone culture“.
For whatever reason, the phones from there have never caught on in other parts of the world. According to The New York Times, Takeshi Natsuno, the man who created the insanely popular i-Mode Internet service in Japan, has assembled a forum of twenty of the best people in the cell phone market to figure out why the country can’t seem to get their phones to take off elsewhere. For the Japanese cell phone manufacturers to survive, the companies will have to look elsewhere as the market is shrinking due to the immense saturation they have already achieved.
Some of the problems already identified include:
- For whatever reason, Japanese prefer clamshell designs, something that has fallen out of favor elsewhere in the world.
- While the physical features of the phones are robust, the software is a bit archaic compared to other smartphones of the world.
- All of those physical features have left the phones there slightly bigger than other phones, and people in other countries prefer slimmer phones.
The basics are there, the Japanese companies will just have to learn to refine them if they ever hope to break into other markets.
On a personal note, I have traveled to Japan several times on business, and I have rented a cell phone each time to use during my stay. At the end of each trip, I really didn’t want to give my Japanese phone up. The interface may be a bit more clunky, but they are amazingly deep in features.
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