We’re back from a summer in Japan, with fond memories of new friends, shopping bags full of cheap plastic Gundam action figures and several bottles of fine sake. But I would throw it all under the country’s speedy Shinkansen bullet train for just one more day with my beloved Japanese mobile phone.
For a month, I toted around Vodafone’s 905SH, manufactured by Japan’s Sharp. It sported a stainless steel frame and a striking black 2.6-inch LCD screen, which swiveled 90 degrees to display nine channels of digital television in crisp, widescreen format. It also surfed the Web, served as a debit card, downloaded and played music and took two-megapixel photos. It won my heart. Here in America’s pokey mobile-phone market, we have nothing like it.
Thanks to early investments in high-speed mobile networks, Japan’s cellular telephone industry is about a year and a half ahead of America’s. Everywhere you look, it shows. Subway riders tap messages to friends, listen to music and play games on their handsets. More than half of Japan’s cell-phone users own speedy 3G broadband phones (versus a puny 5 percent in the United States).
The Japanese have enjoyed analog TV on their mobile phones since 2003, but the quality was erratic and users would lose the signal on moving trains. Earlier this year, the carriers unveiled a new digital TV standard, devised solely for mobile devices. The quality is excellent. My phone not only played seamless television but let me record, TiVo-style, up to five hours of TV on a one-gigabyte memory card.
Why? Because the markets are different. That +50% vs. 5% should tell you how large of a market these feature have in each country, and how large the “early adopter” segment of the Asian market really is.
What I’m interested in is how much of a selection is made available in the Japanese market. In that, when I look at the list of cell phones currently available for my provider (Verizon), I see a lot of older stuff, and a lot of overlaping feature-sets.
The Koreans get great cell phones, too. I enjoy reading about them on various gadget websites. The reviewers (who tend to be American so that I can read what they are saying, although there are probably lots of foreign reviewers, also) often bemoan the fact that the phones probably won’t make it to America, or if and when they do, lots of the cool features will have been disabled.
The reason why U.S. is behind many countries is because it’s still protectionist and conservative. A way to introduce new technological features to masses is for Campuses like Microsoft and Apple to be early adopters.
Its NOT the early adopters,..
Its that the price of TECh in japan and Koria is CHEAP.
And US Imported charge PREMIUM prices, for what ends up, we pay about what is paid in japan.. SRP is $200 and you get it for $50 WITH a 3 year contract. When in Japan its $20-30 MAX..
REAl question comes to WHY, in the USA we pay for 3-5 year old tech at 10 times the PRICE? when most of the money goes to the corps in the US.
THEn we cant buy direct from the makers, EITHER.
Just give me a cell phone that always works, and that works in most places. I don’t make phone calls with my TV, and don’t need a cell phone that plays TV shows.
I have SMS on my cell phone, and have never used it. Same with the Web feature–resolution’s too coarse to be used for most websites. My iPod contain the music I want.
The carriers suck! The only method that would work really well in the US would be for the carriers to provide a high speed network and then the consumer would get a phone that they liked made by Apple or Nokia or whomever. This will probably happen but not until 3G or maybe 3G and a half. You can buy lots of world phones now but the difference between the US and Japan or Europe is the network. I will start a company and fix this whole mess.
Here, in the boonies of Indiana, our reception is terrible. While calls aren’t dropped all that often, the reception is almost always bad. And as bad as it is, the competition also has their bad points. I only use my cell when it is totally necessary.
I want good phone service before I’ll consider trinkets like video.
I know nothing about this subject – so someone help me out with a question. Does the geographic size and density of U.S. vs. Japan make a lot of difference? Or U.S. vs. Europe for that matter.
It seems easier to me to wire a country that is only the size of one of our states vs. trying to roll out new tech and infrastructure in the U.S. or even just select places in the U.S.
Just get a Treo or anyother smartphone and then you can do anything this guy can, including the streaming video. Orb.com can stream from any pc tuner card equiped desktop pc to a Windows Mobile or 3g enabled phone. You can also set MP3s as ring tones.
Shawn has a point that I wanted to bring up. Japan is about the size of California. Put 43% of the US population in California, you’ll see how fast investment would be done to put high speed wireless every where.
I think a big part of our problem is we are building out 6 identical, overlapping cell phone networks over a very large country. Every minor change to the network will get installed piecemeal or not at all and costs billions. Our Geography is much more spread out, and user density much lower in this country. Unless the FEDS step in and force the consolidation of the industry to 2 carriers, the current MESS will continue indefinatly.
Competition is usually a good thing, but unfortunatly not always perfect.
Don
Don
This begs the question: what is on TV that is so important we need access to it on our cell phones? OK Seinfeld reruns, but what else?
12 This begs the question: what is on TV that is so important we need access to it on our cell phones?
Agreed.
And why the “TIVO-like” ability to record 5-hours of it to a memory card on a portable device?
Why not just have a “TIVO-like” device at home to record any of that stuff for you?
The problem isn’t the number of carriers, it’s the fact that we have several competing standards: GSM, CDMA, TDMA, AMPS, iDEN. Right now things are consolidating on two: CDMA and GSM. However, with Sprint going with WiMax for their 4G stuff, rumors are about that Sprint will dump CDMA and go with GSM. That would leave Verizon as the sole national carrier with CDMA and a heck of a lot of towers on GSM.
My cell phone dispenses assorted sweets and snack food items. It also vibrates in a sensual manner. Sweeeeet!!!!! Another telemarketer calling! Let it ring baby.
John
look at disposable income
This kind of thing mystifies me. I hardly use my TV to watch TV… why on earth a phone would need to take pictures, let alone do something as pointless as watch TV…
I guess if these came to the US I couldn’t tell people to get off their couches, leave the TV and go outside for a change. Because they could just watch TV out there too.
8,
Its the profit margins…
These folks make ALOt of money, and install Old tech.
They dont look to the future and to expansion.
They put up the BARE minimum, and expect it to work 10+ years.
It took then 20+ years to get Analog up and running. NOW digital is here, and it will take ANOTHER 20 years to get it out to the Boonies and hiway system.
But the way things ARE. when a type of Tech gets popular int he US, prices go up for the materials to Put it up. Which is only profit into another corps pockets. If they could be nice to each other, and SERVE each other, and work together, insted of penny pinching basterds that they ARE, maybe the TECH in the US would be behind by 5-10 years, and we would be in the TOP again…We NOW rank about 4-6th..
#13 good point, but if the TiVO could be programmed using the cell phone I could do it while I travel home on the train as I read the TV listing pages on the web or even in the evening paper.
New feature required
I lived in korea for a year in 2003,… I too miss the tech, but the reasons we don’t get cell phones like this in america are easy,… Unkle sam, and our phone service would haffta help get our country in the stream line of multi media. Those other countries use 20 strands of fiber optics where we use 3. Their governments helped them get wired up. Thats not gunna happen in this country, allso its not helpfull to have companies like verizon overcharge us for obsolite phones with disabled features that come out after 6 months for an overcharged upgrade, that by the way, is obsolite, and usually made in korea or japan, funny cause when i lived in korea the phones they were way nicer then when i came back,… i wonder if american phone companies are buying the phones 4 years in advance, or asking them to build old models,… either way, we as americans should be pissed that we let ourselves be marketed like sheep to an imbarresing extent. Other countrys litterally laff at our tech,…. and we’re a superpower?