A Quick Peek At Japanese Mobile Stores
I found myself in Tokyo this morning (Editor: Translation: He is in Japan), and thought I’d have a look at the local mobile scene. It’s a matter of faith that Japan is 18-24 months ahead of the US in terms of the mobile market, but now that MediaFLO is up and running and everyone offers reasonably advanced mobile content, the difference seems to be incremental. For example, no-one is surprised anymore when people take a photo with a mobile phone. However even in situations where people are careful to take a good camera (as a tourist on holiday, for example) most Japanese seem to rely on their phones.
I went to the Softbank and KDDI AU stores to check out the phones, and I have to say I was a little disappointed. The phones are better than I’ve seen in other places, but they don’t seem that far ahead—I guess my expectations had been pumped a little high. I should also add the disclaimer that I just walked in off the street and can’t read Japanese, so I pretty much had to press buttons at random. One main difference was the user interface—it looked a lot better, but I couldn’t decide if it was because the screens were better or due to better design. The phones of both companies also appeared to have more customization options.
The Softbank TV phone (912SH) is impressive and I like the swivel style. The screen image was pretty crisp, although I have seen better in demonstrations at CTIA—although that was at the Nvidia stall with the Nvidia graphics chip inside. One thing I did notice at both Softbank and KDDI was a higher consistency in the image than I’ve seen elsewhere, even with other broadcast systems. There’s almost no jerking or pixilating or freezing the background and just adjusting the focus point. I got an uninterrupted view of the Sumo wrestler in the red suit push the Sumo wrestler in the blue suit out of the ring. In fact, I was more impressed with the camera in this phone. It’s not that it had more megapixels, but the images were clearer and had better color, the focusing of the camera was excellent.
After the Softbank flagship store I walked around the corner to the KDDI design studio—and it really is a studio with a demonstration area—and had a look at its phones. I had much the same reaction. For example, the TV was good and consistent, it was easy to change channels, but not that much better than the phones I’ve seen supporting DVB-H or MediaFLO.
KDDI does have a really good design store though—it doesn’t just look good but they’ve hooked phones up to computers with walkthroughs to show customers what is possible. They had a Walkman phone hooked up (one of my favorite phones out of the ones I saw) focusing on music, and other phones hooked up to kiosks with a lot of details shown. I couldn’t make much use of these examples because of my lack of Japanese, but then an assistant came and showed me the demo of how to make business cards that include a QR code. Pretty cool demo—and I realised that you don’t need to take a picture of the QR code, just get the picture approximately in the frame while the application is running and it happens automatically. It’s a lot easier to use than I thought it would be.
It’s possible the phones had more features that I just never found, but of those that I did find the features were slightly better than other phones I’ve seen, but not revolutionally better. The menus looked better and navigated quicker, but I didn’t work out how to use the internet because I couldn’t work out how to change the predictive text from Japanese to English. All the phones seemed to take better photos than I’m used to, and it seemed to be a case of improving the color quality rather than the number of pixels (but I’m not an engineer). The high-end cameras in Japan seem to be only slightly better than the high-end cameras elsewhere—in fact Softbank is offering the Nokia N93 as one of its handsets, and a mate of mine backed a truck over his N93 only a few weeks ago. However, penetration is different—whereas in the US or Australia only a few percent have these high-end handsets, in Japan they appear to be the norm.
Images of my intrepid journey can be seen here.
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