Here are my mobile phone strap accessories!
:photo @TechCrunch50I already wrote about how Japanese handsets look like, now let me share the inside.
Most handsets in Japan are not recognized by the manufacturer but by the operator, this happens because most operators "build" their own handsets, they take the design from the handset manufacturers but all the features and keys are customized for the operator. This is particularly true with NTT Docomo and KDDI, Softbank (previous Vodafone Japan) is not so involved in this process (maybe that is one of the reasons for them to be the 3rd player in the market). So, when a Japanese is going to buy a phone, instead of saying I want the Nokia XX, they say, I want the NTT XX... it might seem a small difference, but it shows the power of the operators in the Japanese market.
So how does the phone looks inside? One thing is that Japanese people like list menus and they like to see everything at once, so most phones have a list menu and most of the features are available at the first glance. Of course, because there are a lot features, they have second and third level menus, but the most common features are available right there on the first level menu.
For a foreigner like me, the big difference is that the most common features for a Japanese are different then my own. For example I use SMS, Japanese use e-mail, so e-mail is right there... SMS is hidden somewhere always hard to find!
Besides the menu itself, the general usage of the mobile phone is very different, for example, whenever I use a NTT phone, if I call someone and want to redial that number, just pressing the green key doesn't work... for some reason that I still don't understand, the call log is always hard to find, so I tend to give up and just write the number again or go to the contacts address book!
This probably explains why most western handset manufacturers have a small market share in Japan.
There were new interesting services started at TC50.
I am a foreigner living in Japan, and I've been working for jig.jp for almost 1 year now. When I arrived here in Japan about 2 years ago, I didn't really know what I was going to find around Japanese mobile phones, I read the industry was more developed, that applications such as e-mail on the mobile phone were commonly used by everyone, but I had no specific ideas around the handsets itself and how they looked like.... well, I found out that the market is truly unique.
By looking around me I saw that the phone models that I used to see in Europe were not available here. The only Nokias I found were used by foreign people! Also the color of the phones is quite different... in Europe and the US, most phones are black, dark grey, silver, blue... color models are not so popular, but here in Japan most women, but also men, have white, pink, orange, green flashing phones! Also, I would say 85% of the phones are clamshell phones, 14% are slide phones and only 1% are bar phones... (attention this data is based on my eyes and common sense only)!
I managed to buy a clamshell navy blue Samsung phone, and I was happy about it!
