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Why Japan Hates the iPhone
Ponca City, We love you writes "With a high level of technical sophistication, critical customers, and high innovation rate, Japan is the toughest cell phone market in the world. So it's not surprising that although Apple is the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, selling 10 million units in 2008, in Japan the iPhone is selling so poorly it's being offered for free. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera, multimedia text messaging, nor a TV tuner. Pricing plans in Japan are also very competitive, and the iPhone's $60-and-up monthly plan is too high compared to competitors; a survey lat year showed that among Japanese consumers, 91% didn't want to buy an iPhone. The cellular weapon of choice in Japan would be the Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV and features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera, and motion sensors for Wii-style games. 'When I show this to visitors from the US, they're amazed,' according to journalist Nobi Hayashi, who adds, 'Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.'"
Have you ever noticed that they speak some strange version of the Mexican language and look unlike us? Also their food is expensive because we eat cows which are large, plentiful and docile animals, while Japanise people only eat fearsome and rare SHARKS to boast of their manliness. In conclusion, Japan is a far away place somewhere in Mexico where smart people do not eat cows. Thank you will you marry me.
Or maybe good taste is relative and not an absolute.
*in your best schoolgirl voice*
Kawaii~~~
or alternatively
*breathing heavily and drooling*
Moe~~~
Because we're at the behest of the phone companies, not the other way around. They can comfortably sit on technology, and decide when to release/market it for the most $$$.
Then not only are you stuck with older technology, you're locked out of exploiting that technology to its fullest extent, by the same companies who have a secondary market peddling crappy closed source software.
Roll on OpenMoko.
Depending on whether it's set to vibrate?
"'Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.'"
God, how I wish I could get that Japanese cellphone with built-in 3" TV (Panasonic P905i) because I've always chosen cellphones out of regard of what Japanese teenagers might think of me! :-p
Sorry, I'll just stick with the iPhone, and upgrade to a phone based on Android when it matures. I would have love to have gone with an openmoko phone but that platform was pretty much stillborn. :(
Japanese cellphones are way way ahead of ours? Next thing you know, you'll be telling us that third-world countries have faster interweb access than we do - without bandwidth caps. This is old news.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Indeed.
The Japanese make a mockery of WTO "free trade" regulations on a daily basis, but they get away with because they're a relatively small market compared to the US. By contrast, when some of us in the US suggest that maybe we should switch to "fair trade" that imposes tariffs on goods imported from places that have zero environmental protection laws and pay out slave-labor wages (to even the playing field), we get shouted at about "protectionism."
The Japanese also have a major cultural complex about what is "true japanese." If you have one grandparent who wasn't born in Japan (or worse yet, isn't ethnically asian), it doesn't matter that your family may have been there for 75 years, as far as they are concerned you're still a gaijin. If you're there for tourism, grand, but trying to live there and get employment, or even someday fit into Japanese society as a gaijin? Might as well forget it unless you're going to be an Engrish teacher (and even then, the "natives" will get promoted above you every time).
American and European products? Well, that's gaijin stuff.
Maybe we just need stop believing that we all must have a cell phone and stop buying the crap about which you are complaining? Or we all buy stripped down, inexpensive models with basic plans.
What you may not be factoring in is that the vast majority of the American cell phone-buying public thinks the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They don't care about Linux, and they don't know what Japan is doing outside of their anecdotal awareness that the Japanese are very tech-savvy.
If you want the government to force cell phone companies and carriers to do anything it will cost you tax dollars - probably a greater amount relative to the time you will have to wait for the cell phone companies/carriers to come to your awareness in their own time.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
We don't get these kinds of telephones in Europe or the US because the... Wait for it... They...
SUCK!
No, seriously, they absolutely suck. I've been using the phones here for a few years, and one of the main features they have is that they're an implementation of a checklist of features you'll never use more than one or twice, all crammed into the least user-friendly UI you could imagine.
They have absolutely no sense of UI design, and being so used to dealing with crappy interfaces they're not even aware of the possibility nor the advantages of a well designed one. Seriously, have you ever looked at one of their webpages?
Call it taste, or what ever. But the reality is that the iPhone and phones from e.g. Nokia just don't do it well here in Japan, and neither of the two companies should try to change or they'll lose what gives them customers in the west.
Oh, and BTW... Softbank's (particulary their iPhone's) subscription plan sucks.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Kanji input on the iPhone is as good as the other cell phones. Given that text messaging is a major use for cell phones, this is a big problem.
The UI on the iPhone blows away Japanese cell phones (I live in Japan and I use them all the time). The reason the iPhone isn't taking off as well in Japan is the kanji support and Softbank's piss poor marketing support. They have not done a good job of differentiating the iPhone from the other touch screen phones and, in fact, SoftBank carries several other touch screen phones which is confusing.
'Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.'
It doesn't do much for your reputation in the U.S. either...
I like to use the old Bluetooth headset analogy.
Old Techie: "You know how lumberjacks will sometimes put a big red X on trees?"
Young Techie (who is wearing a bluetooth headset): "Like, yeah."
O.T.: "That big red X is a sign to other lumberjacks that the tree bearing it needs to be culled from the population."
Y.T.: "Culled. That's not really a word, is it?"
O.T.: "The bluetooth headset is the human equivalent."
/s/bluetooth\ headset/iPhone/g
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Japan's culture of usability is "different" from ours to say the least.
Having worked in the electronics industry, I can tell you that Japanese users place high value on features and technical complexity. Mastering a technically complex device is viewed as an accomplishment.
Look at some of the electronics designed for the Japanese market - rows and rows of tiny buttons, incomprehensible menus, difficult to read displays; then look at electronics designed for the US market - touch screens, big legible fonts and buttons, simple - easy to navigate menus.
(Most of) western society places a high value on ease of use over functionality. Apple does very well in those markets. Japanese culture is very detail oriented and places value on technical complexity and function.
It's a culture thing, and Apple needs to understand that if they want to succeed in the Japanese market.
-ted
Because all these articles are talking rubbish. Japan is not ahead of us here, they just don't want the same thing as us. I explicitly don't want a phone that's a 3" TV, I don't want a phone that's a 5 megapixel camera with a shit lens, I don't want a phone that's a video camera, I don't want a phone that can send MMSes (especially when it can send email).
I want a phone that's simple to use, beautiful, and gets on with being a phone, which the iPhone is absolutely ideal for.
p.s. I *definitely* don't want a phone shaped like hello kitty.
Apple is in absolutely no way the "third-largest mobile supplier in the world".
Not even close.
The top are: Nokia (40%), Samsung (14%), Motorola (14%), Sony Ericsson (9%) and LG (7%). Apple is well down in the single digits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone
On the other hand they have captured a surprisingly large share of the revenue, but only because the iPhone is a high margin product and they don't compete in the high volume area.
They're very biased towards home-grown stuff.
...the iPod sells well in Japan...
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
No, the question we should ask us is precisely "why is Japan so far ahead of us technologically". I want to know why they can have all that fancy stuff on their phones, and I can't. The question "why is Japan so far behind us in soft technologies?" is not for us, but for Japan. It's their problem, so it's them who should think about it. Why waste time on thinking why somebody else has a problem you don't?
but they get away with because they're a relatively small market compared to the US.
What?! They are the second largest economy in the world... That's hardly what I'd call a "small market".
In Japan, only old people use iPhones?
No, the fact is that the iphone is a piece of crap that doesn't do anything special. It's a triumph of marketing.
The only reason the iphone is popular in the US is that other US cell phone options are so crappy, but that's a reflection of what the US carriers are selling.
That would be a good theory were it true, but the fact is the US cell phone market has always been even further behind than just skipping the beta phase. Every time I'd visit and go into a shop selling mobiles I'd have to chuckle to myself at the stuff they were selling which was years behind what we had even in Europe, let alone Japan.
This is why the original iPhone was a flop everywhere but the US (yes it was even a flop in Europe), people were looking at it and thinking what's the big deal when it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.
Move forward to the iPhone 3G and Apple have realise their mistakes and have moved forward a bit, but as stated in the summary, the iPhone still lacks features that many in Europe and Japan have come to expect.
The US is a world leader on most things, but cell phones are one of the few products the US was simply years behind on, often never even getting some of the high end Nokia models we enjoyed in Europe For example, did the US ever even get the Nokia 7650 in the end? a phone that in 2001 had a camera, could play Doom, browse the web, run Java apps- in fact, everything the original iPhone had minus touch screen but plus a whole bunch of other features (MMS, custom apps).
Apple realised the mobile gap was in the US and took advantage of that, they couldn't compete immediately with the companies like Nokia that had been doing it years and the US gave them a place to get started without ever needing to do so. Once their foot was in the door they could fairly quickly move on with their technology to produce a phone that was a little more attractive in Europe/Japan, if they keep it up and keep going they'll do well.
At the end of the day though, the summary comes as no suprise as it really is quite similar to the story here in Europe. It's not to slag Apple off, because if the US was as uptodate on mobile technology as Europe it's questionable whether Apple could've got it's foot in the door as easily as it did and more fool Nokia et. al. for not taking the opportunity to exploit the rather backwards US cell phone market themselves. I think this is also why the iPhone has the following it does, not necessarily because it's any better than other phones outside North America- it still lacks a lot of features European and Japanese phones have, but because it's a decent mid-range phone in Europe/Japan and more importantly, because it is light years ahead of much of what the US ever really had before it.
ALso, for whatever reason, people seemed less impressed by its fancy pants touch scrolling UI, and more interested in simple lists they could click through, and being able to pull down over the air TV versus d/l videos.
Personally, I agree with my Japanese friends; I'm not a huge fan (I like a keyboard).
But, it's interesting to note that almost every expat American I saw on my last trip had an iPhone, though -- so there might be just more appeal, culturally, to Amercians and westerners for some reason. There's certainly no shortage of cult-of-Mac people in Japan, but it didn't seem to translate to the phone.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
What's happened? Our culture decided sometime in the 50's-60's that doing well in school was for losers. We've also developed a sense of entitlement and think everything should be low cost or free, regardless of how much it costs to manufacture or develop (a co-worker who complained about the "high gas prices" when gas was $1.50 a few weeks back comes to mind.......I think if gas was free she'd complain that we weren't being paid to take the gas!). The main reason behind people thinking we're the most technologically advanced country is the idiotic "God Bless America" / "We're #1" crap that tells people being born in the US somehow makes you special and you don't have to work as hard.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Get over yourself. My mother's caucasian American, my Father's Japanese. I don't get treated like a Gaijin even though I definitely don't have the pure-Japanese look. All it takes is a good understanding of the culture (and living it), and speaking Japanese like a native. I've never had anyone promoted over me simply because they were more Japanese than I was, although I have been accused of the opposite, in that my "American" background put me at an advantage. (Partially true, since both Japanese and English are a native language to me, and speaking both is a massive plus in my field, but that has nothing to do with my genetic makeup.) The "he got promoted because he was xxxx" is, 90% of the time, the sound of a loser whining.
One thing I see with "Engrish Teachers" getting passed up for promotion is that their English is good, but the Teaching part is not. (Which is to be expected... how many gaijin English teachers in Japan do you know that have had adequate training to become a teacher? A number very close to ZERO would be the answer.) That may not be the teacher's fault considering the way these teachers are recruited, but it is certainly a valid reason why the promotions may not be moving in their favor.
As far as the iPhone is concerned, I have one, and I know what the complaining is all about. I'd say that 50% of the problem is that the iPhone doesn't offer any of the proprietary "keitai" functions that everyone has come to expect from ANY phone these days in Japan. Offer a product that doesn't have the functions you want, and it's no surprise that people don't want it. However, another 50% of the problem is that it's locked into the SoftBank carrier. Piss poor customer service, terrible reception unless you're in the middle of one of the big cities, and bad pricing plans upon launch.
But when the summary quotes Nobi Hayashi (who the hell is this guy!?) as saying that carrying an iPhone is "lame", well... sounds like he's either sour because he doesn't have one, or else he only hangs around keitai geeks. Having an iPhone is a GREAT conversation starter with girls. Carrying a Panasonic P905i isn't gonna generate the same kind of enthusiasm.
The Japanese word transliterated "kawaii" is usually translated "cute" in dictionaries, and is composed of two kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), the first meaning "to be able to, to be allowed to" and the second meaning "to love" or "love". The Chinese word written the same way (ke3 ai4) is also translated as "cute" and the implied meaning from the order of the characters/words is "loveable".
Yes, that would most likely be the word used by Japanese tweenies and teenaged (and even older) ladies. Just remember, this is the nation and culture that brought us "Hello Kitty".
To each their own, I guess. I just got back from Switzerland, and had one person comment on how fancy my phone was. She had heard of iPhones but I guess had never seen one, or an iPod Touch either. This is from a family with 5 iPods.
:-( Things here are even worse.
Maybe, as others have stated, Apple designed a product which would sell well in its primary market, the US. There's a "duh" moment for you. Yes, other markets have better mobile phones and coverage, but as a Canadian I don't feel bad for you Americans
I have to say though that given what little I've seen of the Panasonic P905i, I'd take the iPhone any day. A phone with a giant antenna and TV access? No thanks. It goes back to cultural preferences once again.
www.clarke.ca
There are a lot of American things that seem to be chic in Japan, but technology has never really been one of them. It's like trying to impress a German with your precision-engineered American luxury car or something.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
True, and there are things about Japanese culture which make their cel phone market very different from ours. One of the biggest things is the way in which the Japanese commute to and from work: Japan has a much higher use of public transportation than does the U.S., and the Japanese are heavy users of rail travel. This means, according to the last figures I checked, the average Japanese working person has an hour commute to and from work which is, essentially, free time. Contrast this to the U.S., in which the majority of people drive to work.
To me, this explains a lot of the Japanese demand for the use of video and TV on the cel phones, and from the cel phone networks: they have the time and inclination to use those services. Contrast this to the U.S., in which people have to (supposedly) concentrate on their driving; we have lots of talk radio here, something to listen to during that commute which requires no hands.
Add to this all of the other commuting the Japanese do via rail and you have a market which just doesn't exist in the U.S. I think this holds true in Europe as well, which also has a higher incidence of public transportation use than the U.S. We drive here, a lot, and that niche just doesn't exist. Most Americans get their online TV and video either at work or at home. Which is to say that population and work patterns influence technology adoption and use as much as, or more than, GUI design and technical achievement.
At least that's my theory.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
...every douche already owns one.
I don't.
I drank what? -- Socrates
In Japan, there were already touch screen phones, and phones with full web browsers built in long before the iPhone was even announced. What you have on the iPhone now is about where Japan was around 4 or 5 years ago. The P905i mentioned in TFA was on the market in 2007 when Steve was making his iPhone keynote.
No, the fact is that the iphone is a piece of crap that doesn't do anything special.
Wrong: there's that one app that displays a zippo lighter, and you can open up the zippo and light it, and then if you tilt the phone the flame ACTUALLY MOVES!
Yeah. Put THAT in your pipe and then use that app to smoke it.
Ah, that explains the spherical white helmet.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Could somebody explain what the point of a 10 MP CCD is with a typical cell phone lens being only 1.25 mm in diameter with a 3.5 mm focal length? That's like putting a Ferrari engine in a Pinto, but slightly less useful.
By my math, the resolving power of the lens provides for a horizontal resolution (at the red end of the spectrum) of just shy of 4,000 pixels in the long direction on a cell-phone-sized CCD, and that's if the lens is ground perfectly and if the alignment between lens and CCD is also perfect. Chances are, at 3600 pixels, a 10 MP photo is probably significantly exceeding the real-world resolving power of any real-world cell camera lens unless the lens costs $10,000 to grind and is glued to the sensor....
Not to mention that the light gathering capabilities of such a small lens are terrible and that the low light SNR of a CCD is inversely proportional to the number of pixels. Can a 10 MP cell phone camera take pictures of usable quality in anything less than the light of the sun going nova?
Seriously, I just don't get it. It's like they're adding pixel count because they can without stopping to consider whether they should.... Above about 3 MP, a cell camera makes no sense given the lens size, quality, and mounting tolerances. Maybe 5 MP. Maybe.
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Eh, for me it was cheaper to get an iPhone, both phone wise and plan wise than a Blackberry or any other 3g capable device.
I couldn't care less about MMS, I can upload photos to facebook or get stuff off of my e-mail.
I also have no desire to watch videos, if I'm going to watch TV or a movie, it's going to be off of my DVR or computer on my 52" TV and 7.1 surround system on my comfortable couch with a beer, not on my tiny ass cell phone. Youtube, the internet and the app store provide more than enough instant entertainment if I'm stuck somewhere or bored.
I have no need for turn by turn directions either, I actually prefer google maps + GPS.
My biggest complaint about the iPhone is that you have to crack it to do certain things, like copy over ringtones.
The iPhone doesn't suck, you're just being anti-trendy and generally pissed. I'm not a fan of trendy shit or Apple in general, but the iPhone is a pretty good device.
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