Monday, May 28, 2012

Japan and smartphones

How bizarre: Japan is behind the west not only with social media, but also with smartphones. It's only now that iPhones etc is starting to take off there.
I wonder what could cause this? They love gadgets, love Apple products. And they even have a whole sub-culture of short novels written specifically to be read on mobile phones! Because they're packed like sardines on the trains, see, no space for a laptop, maybe not even an iPad. So smartphones should be a perfect fit there. (It seems Kindle has not yet been launched in Japan though it should be close.)
I'm sure it'll come fast. If they like reading on a crude Nokia display on the subway, just wait til they try it on the high-rez display on the iPhone 4.

4 comments:

Bert said...

To say that the Japanese are behind is silly. The fact is that Japan is radically different from the West in just about every aspect of life, often so in ways that can be impossible to understand to us.

They have social interaction structures (good and bad) that you cannot even imagine, so why should you expect that they waste their time on Facebook like our local retards?

Their phones have been crammed with features like video calling and tons of games years before any fruit company ever even got interested in communications. They might have been using very limited devices by today's standards, but the difference between a smartphone loaded with crappy apps (that you have to pay for) and their "dumb" phones preloaded with crappy but free apps sure wasn't obvious to them (marketeers saw to that).

geoff belfer said...

interesting clip illustrating how japan (and other cultures) do things in a different way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1zh49J5rsg

Anonymous said...

Bert, you're a moron. Well, you knew that.

Ever been to Japan? No. Ever been outside your own country? No.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Indeed, I did stumble over the term "behind", since it's often used judgementally.