Pic: Vodafone 905SH, by jetalone
Great article from MSNBC.com about how Japan's mobile phone industry is 1.5 years ahead of America's (and even more ahead of Aus/NZ I suspect). Judging from my series on international Web markets, Korea and China are just as advanced in mobile Web. MSNBC notes:
"Thanks to early investments in high-speed mobile networks, Japan‚Äôs cellular telephone industry is about a year and a half ahead of America‚Äôs. Everywhere you look, it shows. Subway riders tap messages to friends, listen to music and play games on their handsets. More than half of Japan‚Äôs cell-phone users own speedy 3G broadband phones (versus a puny 5 percent in the United States). Advertisements for an even cooler wave of new handsets now adorn public billboards, in advance of new ‚Äúnumber portability‚Ä? rules coming this fall. The regulations will make it possible for users to keep their numbers when changing wireless services‚Äîin effect intensifying competition between the three major mobile carriers and forcing them to innovate. The phones are about to get even cooler."
The digg post on this is also interesting:
"Culture is surely a part, as are the U.S. wireless carriers themselves. Consumers here tend to be multi-device users. They like a phone in their pocket, but there's also a laptop or desktop involved in daily computing..."
Personally the main reason I'm not an advanced mobile user is the sheer cost of doing so in my country (NZ). I found it interesting to note that Japan has a very competitive mobile phone industry: "Prices are dropping, new handsets are coming and the carriers are upgrading networks with even faster 3G technology." When will the Western world wake up to the mobile revolution?
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Asian Mobile Web Years Ahead.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2745
There has been a lot of great discussion on Read/WriteWeb recently, so I thought I'd pick out some highlights from a few of last week's posts... Engelbart's vision exists! Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched: early this week saw the launch... Read More
Next in our series on international Web markets is Japan. The information for this post was provided by Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners - one of the largest Venture... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
A note about Japan
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | September 7, 2006 7:01 PM"I teach one marketing class to about 25 Japanese students, all about 20-years-old. Only four have a computer of their own and most have never used PowerPoint. As freshman they even 'lack basic computing skills' by US standards (though their cell phone surfing aptitude surpasses anything in the US)."
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/09/is_a_computer_l.html
One major difference between many asian countries, and the US and NZ is population density. I imagine it's a lot more cost effective for countries with high population density to lay out advanced networks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
What would you rather have - the beautiful low population landscape of NZ, or advanced cellphone networks? (Same goes for high speed broadband)
However there is no excuse for the crap selection of phones in NZ. I really hope that if apple releases a phone, it will be GSM compatible, and available in countries other than the US.
Posted by: ipearx | September 7, 2006 7:49 PMMy part of the Western world (UK/Europe) has already caught up. In fact we've never been behind in mobile phone technology. My phone is 3G, 1GB hard drive, 3.2mp camera (with flash), video camera etc etc but it's probably not the most advanced model available.
The US is woefully behind but not all the Western world.
Posted by: Stephen Davies | September 8, 2006 1:18 AM"When will the Western world wake up to the mobile revolution?"
That will only happen when the market urges so. Speaking about the hardware, for instance, cellphone makers aren't interested in releasing their rich-feature brand-new-technology phone to a market if their old-and-way-cheap-technology still sells well... They want and will maximize the return of investiment in each cellphone model they have by maximizing the product's lifetime as a viable product in the market. I can extend my thoughts on this if you want.
"My part of the Western world (UK/Europe) has already caught up."
No it hasn't. Maybe the parent article isn't too descriptive, but we here in Europe are far behind the Asian market specially in two technology areas: mobile technology and the games industry. And I understand that UK's market is better than other, but the kind of technology you have there is that same that I have here in Portugal.
Posted by: Mind Booster Noori | September 8, 2006 5:24 AMI live in Japan but I am frustrated by the selection of phones available. Not one one phone offers plain MP3 playback. You can get a phone with stereo speakers built in but can only populate it with music bought from the phone network's store or music that you have ripped from CD with software that comes with the phone.
I just want to download an MP3 podcast, copy it over to the phone and listen to it on my way to work but I'm forced to buy a separate MP3 music player to do so.
What's worse is that some phones support a format which is basically a wrapper around MP3 that adds DRM support so there is no technical problem in providing MP3 playback on the phone.
Posted by: Stuart Woodward | September 10, 2006 4:47 PMchao ban
Posted by: truong | October 14, 2006 4:07 AM