The article speaks of excess hardware making the phones "surprisingly clunky", but really the phones don't have any hardware that you wouldn't find in a top of the line Nokia, and the software is more or less equally shitty to use. What the Japanese phones do have is software features that rely on carrier support (like iphone's visual voice mail) and widely available cheap data transfer rates, but the actual phones really aren't all that special. Japan should export the infrastructure first, then worry about the phones.
-The internet browsing thing is basically because a lot of Japanese websites have a "mobile mode", ultra simplistic layout as an option. It's not really a phone feature.
-TV receivers in mobile phones require a special signal to be sent for them (the currently available models can't deal with normal dvb-t, for example [AFAIK]), and there are different standards in use for this in different parts of the world. And well, it just isn't a terribly useful feature in the first place.
-Push email is used to replace SMS, which is pretty cool but that'd require a data plan over here.
On the other hand, Japanese phones generally lack stuff we take for granted: t-9 text input, spelling dictionaries, they use a slightly different network standard (FOMA vs 'normal' 3G),... all of which are possible to fix, of course, but then, it wouldn't be that hard for the competitors to copy their good features either.
I'd say that if Japanese phones ever become a hit in the west, it's because of the cool and different designs rather than features.
Yeah, the features in the Japanese market are mostly due to the ease of expanding infrastructure. I remember getting a plan with Au that only had the good features in the Tokyo metro area. That was fine, as I never left that area. Millions of other people were in the same boat. Maybe they left the Tokyo area once or twice a year, but other than that, never.
In the US, that would never fly. The people that are willing to pay for the features need them to work in all the "large metro areas", which doesn't mean "Manhattan" but rather "suburbs of Phoenix" and so on. This makes infrastructure roll-outs very expensive, and it's why they never happen.
(Incidentally, people in the US and Japan have similar commute times, but the population density in the US goes down a lot faster as you move away from the city center. In Tokyo, it's densely packed until you get to the mountains.)
Population density has its advantages; look at everything Japan has that the US doesn't (100Mbps internet for $20/month, interesting cell-phone features, amazing rail systems), and population density explains it all. But then, they don't have 5 bedroom houses for $150,000, either.
Popluation density doesn't completely explain it. For instance here in Sweden we also have 100Mbps Internet-connection for about $20-$30/month and flat-rate 3g data-plans and we aren't exactly densily populated (#192 in the world according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population...). Here I think it has a lot to do with the fact that government has been pushing a lot for better IT-infrastructure.
I'm personally I strong believer in the free market, however sometimes the market is too short-sighted to make investments that will benefit society in the long run. Infrastructure and education are good examples of that. It's hard for private investors to get good ROI on things like roads, IT-networks and schools because it takes many years to get any return and it's hard to charge people as much as it actually benefits the public.
I saw and interview with Bill Gates where he basically said that this was his rationale behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The market simply doesn't maximize the amount of lives saved per dollar and you need non-profit organizations to do that.
And here in Canada we pay 30$/MB for over-the-air data, and a 5Mb (that's mega-bit, not byte) internet connection is almost 50$ per month. That's also pretty much the fastest you can get even in the capital (Ottawa). God I feel like I'm living in a third-world country.
I have to agree with the "equally shitty to use" statement. One of the other problems is that it is hard to get the features you want in a phone that you want. It's along the lines of "GPS, Bluetooth and good Camera: pick any 2." Yu do, however, get a bunch of features that you never need. That, and they seem to have used their mailroom staff to design the UI. People always think they are so advanced. Maybe they were ten years ago, but now not so much.
Oh well, I think I have to disagree with the article there. The Japanese may have different tastes than the western audience, but there definitely is a huge amount of effort spent on just how the phones look. There are cool design choices (like the swivel screen mentioned in the article), boring ones (dozens of different color casings), and a huge amount of after-market customization paraphenelia (stickers, "jewellery", straps, etc.) available. Some cell phone stores and craft stores have prominent displays showing off ridiculously overdone pimped phones covered in gleaming stickers.
What I meant to say earlier was that this look could appeal to some people in the west too. Some people just want something that looks different than the iphone or razr. I know my wife loved the cute pink clamshell phone she had in Japan (that I spent days trying to jailbreak afterwards).
The Internet browsing is real enough to do gmail, NYT, and my admin interface without a line of modification from this bog standard flip phone. Oh, obviously, hn works too.
But you can do that on pretty much any western smartphone, and it's not a particularly new feature. Whether it's good enough to encourage mass adoption is another thing entirely. The Japanese phones do not have a new amazing browser that makes Opera Mini and the Webkit-based browsers common in western phones look like crap, nor do they have bigger, high-resolution screens. The mass adoption webbrowsing on cellphones in Japan is due to widespread use of cellphone-friendly layouts (single narrow column with minimal graphics) on Japanese webpages, and cheaper data plans.
They make the point that Japanese handsets all typically have very (expensively) custom interfaces. If only there was a free-to-build-upon mobile operating system with a decent developer toolkit available.
I lived in Japan from 2002 to 2005. I have to say, one of the first things that struck me was how crazily advanced their cellphones were. Not only that, but _everyone_ had one.
Broadcast television is the only cool thing about Japanese phones, that I miss on my iPhone. I just wish my iPhone could get broadcast (HD?)TV. Is there a reason it couldn't?
What would you do with HD video on a 480x320 screen?
Anyway, it'd need an extra chip to work, which would make the phone bigger, and then it'd kill your battery when you used it (receiving signal, decoding video, playing sound and keeping the screen lit), so it would be useless in all but a few scenarios, like riding the bus to work (but is there anything worthwhile on at that time...).
I used to have a TV-tuner for my Game Gear. Used it maybe three times. It's a useless gimmick 95% of the time.
Other than live sporting events, can you think of anything that broadcast TV would provide that can't be served by the download/sync model? Given the additional chipsets and battery drain from heavy network use I can't see how Apple would view this particular desire as anything more than a need to break the populace from this idea that you watch video programs when some TV network thinks that you should watch them. If the content producers offered Apple access to their content at the same per-subscriber price point that they offer the content to the cable networks then your desires would be met in a much more interesting and appealing fashion.
The article misses a very important point. Carriers have very thorough certification processes. Imagine each of these companies having to certify each device. They would go bankrupt! Well maybe not, but they would not make any money to make it worth while.
ATT has the toughest certification process - so much so that others won't even look at new phones unless ATT has agreed to certify them. ATT certification is like a green light to T-mobile and Voda.
They need to standardize on chipsets and software platforms. The other crap like funky keyboards and lcds are no biggie. Keyword here is scale. Jap phones don't scale for worldwide distribution right now.
There is no actual technical need for certification, though. Only the GSM modem needs to be certified for technical reasons, the rest is just so AT&T can get its advertising all over the phone.
But honestly, Japanese phones are not that amazing. They have pretty cases and nice incremental features, but they are not that different from US / European cell-phones. The "internet access" is not the real Internet in many cases. Japanese phones can also avoid ugly and big QWERTY keyboards because Japanese, in general, has shorter words than English (and therefore multi-press input works better).
You seem to indicate that Japan's carriers has less strict certification process than AT&T's.
My personal experience with NTT DoCoMo (one of the largest carriers in Japan) has been exactly the opposite. Certificaiton has been a very difficult and long process.
-The internet browsing thing is basically because a lot of Japanese websites have a "mobile mode", ultra simplistic layout as an option. It's not really a phone feature.
-TV receivers in mobile phones require a special signal to be sent for them (the currently available models can't deal with normal dvb-t, for example [AFAIK]), and there are different standards in use for this in different parts of the world. And well, it just isn't a terribly useful feature in the first place.
-Push email is used to replace SMS, which is pretty cool but that'd require a data plan over here.
On the other hand, Japanese phones generally lack stuff we take for granted: t-9 text input, spelling dictionaries, they use a slightly different network standard (FOMA vs 'normal' 3G),... all of which are possible to fix, of course, but then, it wouldn't be that hard for the competitors to copy their good features either.
I'd say that if Japanese phones ever become a hit in the west, it's because of the cool and different designs rather than features.