I’ve lost my faith in TechCrunch a while ago, but today I’ve found an interesting article on why Japan can be considered an example of what’s coming next in the rest of the world or not.
The availability of cutting-edge phones is one reason why many Japanese people don’t own a PC but would rather browse the web exclusively on mobile devices. And it’s not just for short bursts. They never write SMS either but rather thumb-text push-mails, often containing little icons, emoticons and coded youth slang acronyms. Booking flights online, ordering clothes, auctioning off used stuff, gaming, paying for movie tickets via direct debit: all of this has been possible on Japanese mobile phones for years now.
This is how it works there, but will this be how we will be using technology in a few years? I guess not. Serkan Toto points out a few factors:
- superior phones
- lot of content
- demanding customers
And also three agents:
- Forward-looking politicians
- Carriers
- Content providers
As for the factors, I disagree with the first one. I have a pretty advanced phone (HTC TyTN) and I can’t make use of it, because I don’t have a flat fee internet plan, and it becomes to damn expensive to use internet on my smartphone (just checking the email for 4 days cost me 6 euros). I believe demanding customers are the most important. The majority of people in Portugal thinks just my dad, that also bought a PDA, and kept just making phone calls (now he’s back to the classic Nokia 3100).
As for content, Portuguese companies aren’t betting in mobile content, because no one uses it. But we sure have a lot of SMS spam and weird businesses around ringtones and java games, that would go away if everyone had internet in their cellphones.
So until carriers start to offer decent deals, we are not becoming any sort of Japan!