Why has Japan had better mobile phones than the United States?

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

by rpsubhub • 15 years ago

33 18 15 years ago

quora.com

sudont• 15 years ago

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.)

dotBen2• 15 years ago

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.

T-R4• 15 years ago

I think his points are valid, but I think you're right, the cultural aspect is huge, as is the marketing, for that matter.

They successfully marketed cameras, infra-red transfer, mobile internet, and QR code scanners to high school and college girls (the most profitable demographic in Japan to sell to). Without that, the other issues likely wouldn't have mattered.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

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.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

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?

minouye• 15 years ago

The quality was different however. 2D bar codes couldn't really take off in the US until mobiles came with hi-res cameras with macrofocus. As evidenced by the ubiquity of QR in Japan, Japan was pretty far ahead of the US in that regard.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

I seem to recall that when I first visited Japan in 2003 and attended a concert, loads of people were attempting to surreptitiously take photos with their mobiles. I don't know what their comparative quality was, but they definitely had cameras on their phones in 2003.

Oh, and flip-phones have been all the rage for as long as I've been going there. I look forward to going back to see if iPhone form factors are gaining popularity yet. You can't swing a dead cat in the US without hitting an iPhone or iPhone knock-off.

T-R4• 15 years ago

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

geuis• 15 years ago

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.

tlear• 15 years ago

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.

dotBen2• 15 years ago

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.

jwwest• 15 years ago

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

T-R4• 15 years ago

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

somabc• 15 years ago

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

donw• 15 years ago

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.

ahi• 15 years ago

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.

Why has Japan had better mobile phones than the United States?

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