We often talk about how Japan has crazy gadgets that do your math homework, clean your house, fire lasers, and make phone calls, all at the same time. And frequently they’re true. Japanese phones have some of the best hardware under the hood. Yet this very well known fact has not served Japanese phone makers so well.
There’s an article out today from the New York Times which discusses why Japanese handsets haven’t caught on outside Japan. I feel like the picture from the article, the one which I’m using for this story, does a good job of explaining a big problem that Japanese phones have: their interfacing capabilities are terrible. Japanese phones are for the most part stuck in the flip phone or slide phone model. That means no keyboard, which is something that handset users in the rest of the world have come to expect from smartphones. No one outside of Japan who requires real email functionality on his phone is going to settle for a device without a qwerty keyboard.
This is one of the two main reasons why the iPhone has become the most popular handset in Japan. The second is a lesson that Microsoft learned before anyone else: it’s not about the hardware, but the software. Many functionalities in Japanese handsets are at the level of hardware. Perhaps the most notable feature that phones in the west do not have is the ability to be used as a credit card to buy things. By comparison, the functionality that we have on western phones are more and more enabled by software. Just look at what you can do with an Android phone or an iPhone. Most of that comes from programs developed by third parties, just as most of what we do on our regular computers is software-based.
Yet market penetration of foreign phones in Japan is still lacking, and largely due to how strange it seems to the Japanese to have a phone that interfaces with a computer. Many people in Japan never plug their phones into their computers, instead downloading whatever they need over the air. So what seems like a typical behavior to western users is an oddity to the Japanese. Still, the success of the iPhone suggests that this behavioral skew is one that can be reversed.
