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Japanese Cell Phones Can't Escape Island Home

by Terrence O'Brien on July 21, 2009 at 06:10 AM

Japan sells some of the most advanced handsets in the world. Sure, the iPhone has a fancy touchscreen, but does it use facial recognition software to unlock it? Can you watch live TV on your BlackBerry Storm? Does the Palm Pre lead a double life as a credit card?

For years, the Japanese have been building phones that are years ahead of other nation's mobiles. Yet companies like NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp (hugely popular in Japan) have had little success in extending their reaches beyond the island nation.

Takeshi Natsuno, of Tokyo's Keio University, told the New York Times that the Japanese cell phone market suffers from Galápagos syndrome. As with the isolated species that Charles Darwin famously discovered on the Galápagos Islands, these Japanese mobiles have evolved in a dramatically different way than have their mainland cousins.

Japanese phones may be impressive from a technological standpoint, but they have a number characteristics that keep them from taking off in the U.S. or Europe. First, while the rest of the world is moving towards smartphones (with a heavy focus on applications that enhance the phones' capabilities), Japanese makers have been sticking with traditional "dumb phone" designs.

There's the question of form, too. Everyone else is going touchscreen, or slider, or both, but the Japanese stubbornly stick with the clamshell design that fell out of favor in the U.S. with the death of the RAZR. To make matters worse, because of all the extra hardware features, Japanese handsets tend to be much bulkier than their Western counterparts.

Like many of the species in the Galápagos, Japanese cell phones are strange and beautiful things, clearly not made to survive outside of their home turf. [From: New York Times]

Tags: biginjapan, cell phone, CellPhone, design, japan, japanese, smartphones, top

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