In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use | Hacker News Reader

In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use

wired.com

8 pointsgms3 comments

In the Asian countries as well. China has extremely advanced mobile phones that are absolutely everywhere.

Who knows how the iPhone will affect them? I think it'll have a pretty big impact, in terms of the UI, design, and application support. NTT DoCoMo, the (I believe) first to implement the 3G stack and system, and I don't know how their mobiles compare to the iPhone.

Mobile is a much bigger part of culture in Asia than in the US. It's not like the regular iPhone/Crackberry addiction and people obsessively reading BGR - it's simply a piece of technology inseparable from some of them, even more so than the US, especially in the city.

what causes the lag in the US?

Like the article said, if consumers want more features. I think it's just that Asian consumers are willing to pay for a premium for more and more features in a mobile phone, while that's not necessarily the case here (simpler phones, etc.) With this, the mobile telecom companies can implement more advanced systems and features into their mobiles. That's at least my speculation.

Also - forgot to add. Micro-commodities are KING in Asia. QQ, the AIM of China, offers a MySpace-like social networking system built on top of their 160-million-subscriber instant messaging system, where micro-commodities like profile customizations for x RMB are just a no-brainer: it's cheap, buy it. Of course, this generates more sales, which thus generates more profits.

QQ even has their own "currency" - QQ Coin, a virtual currency, a 1:1 coin:RMB exchange for purchasing virtual (or sometimes even real) merchandise. [1] 2008Q1 revenues for Tencent were $204mln, profits of $77mln at a margin of 38%. [2]

This is definitely evident in the mobile market. Mobile subscribers in the US are prone to buying some ringtones and customizations, but in China these micro-commodities generate a lot of purchasers - and a lot of money. It's not something that we can completely imitate in the US, since it's part of their culture to purchase these micro-commodities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QQ#QQ_Coin

[2] http://www.tencent.com/ir/pdf/news20080514a_e.pdf

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