Mobile web usage nearly equal PC web in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Mobile web usage nearly equal PC web in Japan

cameronmoll.com

10 pointsdanw8 comments

Japan is an interesting case. From what I understand mobile email has largly replaced SMS usage in Japan

Using e-mail rather than SMS as the messaging medium for mobile phones has made mobile Internet services in Japan more successful than in the West, says an industry expert -- a claim supported by recently discovered mathematical properties of networks.

http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/topic/Networks/Email__Scal...

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Being charged for sending text messages is ridiculous. Look at the iPhone plan, it costs $20 more a month just to have unlimited text messages. Its just TEXT (and only 140 bytes per message maximum).

I dont think users will tolerate that kind of rape much longer when they can send emails (of basically unlimited length) for free. SMS either needs to die or the carriers need to be realistic with how much they charge for what is essentially 15+ yr old technology.

I think most service plans in Japan charge for emails as well as SMS. I'm pretty sure email is way more popular, but SMS is far from dying.

The Comscore report goes on to say hours used per month for mobile is much less than PC however. 8 vs. 19 hrs per month avg. I guess thats to be expected though given that people are on the go when using their mobile phone.

Additional data: "The most popular mobile internet usage was for e-mail (75 percent) followed by News/Information (52 percent), Search/Navigation (51 percent), Games (39 percent) and Blogs (38 percent)."

Japan is kind of quirky. When other academics adopted Lisp, they adopted Prolog. When the rest of the world adopted Perl or Python, they embraced Ruby. Just because Japan does something doesn't mean the rest of the world will follow.

i think for the case of ruby, being invented by a jap influenced its adoption

You're probably right, but "jap" is a racial slur these days.

sorry, didn't know

Reply on news.ycombinator.com