Show profile
Link to this post
Subject: Japanese mobile phones
Japan's mobile phones are light years ahead of anything available in other countries. Fantastic new technology driving silver screens, resolutions so high you can't see the pixels, 13 megapixel cameras, lights that glow and flicker through the plastic shell of the phone itself, etc etc. The pace of change is mind boggling, with each manufacturer piling on feature after feature until the phones are, quite simply, little tiny chunks of magic in your pocket or purse.
But it's an old fashioned race with no clear finish line. Despite all this amazing hardware, it's only hardware, and while these phones have built-in software to make excellent use of it, the platforms aren't very open (ie: completely closed) and you will basically never add a new piece of functional software to your phone for as long as you have it. And that's not very long - most Japanese in the cellular demographic upgrade every two years (as that's when the last contract runs out and your next phone is free) or more often.
This is the same war we've seen fought out in the West for a long time, and now that Apple's shown the future with their unified iphone platform, it's hard to imagine it can possibly continue. I should clarify that I absolutely hate Apple, and I hate myself a little bit for buying one of their phones, but consider the alternative:
Apple has one platform, with a handful of devices, and only three different levels of capability (iphone, 3gs, 4) making it dead easy for developers. Write a baseline app and it works across the board, write for the medium spec'd phone and the low end loses out, but the higher end phones can still run it. Finish the app, and submit it to Apple, and presto - your app is available in the one place all users know about: the app store.
Everyone else has a stack of different models, with different features for different users. High and low res screens, GPS or not, physical keyboard or not, tilt sensors or not, fast processors or slow, lots of RAM or a little bit. A developer has to pick one and code for that, and either write such a low-end app it'll run anywhere (and waste the awesome features of the high end phone) or write a high-end app that uses the cool features very few people actually own. And then, each manufacturer may or may not have an app store, and each carrier may or may not have the same, or you can sell it direct or through another app store, knowing full well the users will probably never find your program.
The Japanese manufacturers are still pursuing the second method, and it's utterly baffling to see it still happening this way. It doesn't make sense.
Apple saw the madness and made a fortune offering a better method. Other companies are seeing similar opportunities for unified platforms in Japan: Mobage Town (mobile game town) offers online, web-based and downloadable content that looks a decade old just to function on the widest range of devices. Gree has their ads for the same things running a hundred times a night, no kidding. They both hype their 'all phones compatible!' message, communities, web services and games that are straight out of 2002. The iPhone has fully-3D liquid-smooth Street Fighter IV, Gree is offering Street Fighter I with shitty cellular controls and choppy old graphics.
So sure, you can get a unified app store in Japan, but at the cost of endless TV commercials. And the result is still just one more app store among many. It's not the app store, like Apple offers.
It's progress, sort of. I guess.
But it's an old fashioned race with no clear finish line. Despite all this amazing hardware, it's only hardware, and while these phones have built-in software to make excellent use of it, the platforms aren't very open (ie: completely closed) and you will basically never add a new piece of functional software to your phone for as long as you have it. And that's not very long - most Japanese in the cellular demographic upgrade every two years (as that's when the last contract runs out and your next phone is free) or more often.
This is the same war we've seen fought out in the West for a long time, and now that Apple's shown the future with their unified iphone platform, it's hard to imagine it can possibly continue. I should clarify that I absolutely hate Apple, and I hate myself a little bit for buying one of their phones, but consider the alternative:
Apple has one platform, with a handful of devices, and only three different levels of capability (iphone, 3gs, 4) making it dead easy for developers. Write a baseline app and it works across the board, write for the medium spec'd phone and the low end loses out, but the higher end phones can still run it. Finish the app, and submit it to Apple, and presto - your app is available in the one place all users know about: the app store.
Everyone else has a stack of different models, with different features for different users. High and low res screens, GPS or not, physical keyboard or not, tilt sensors or not, fast processors or slow, lots of RAM or a little bit. A developer has to pick one and code for that, and either write such a low-end app it'll run anywhere (and waste the awesome features of the high end phone) or write a high-end app that uses the cool features very few people actually own. And then, each manufacturer may or may not have an app store, and each carrier may or may not have the same, or you can sell it direct or through another app store, knowing full well the users will probably never find your program.
The Japanese manufacturers are still pursuing the second method, and it's utterly baffling to see it still happening this way. It doesn't make sense.
Apple saw the madness and made a fortune offering a better method. Other companies are seeing similar opportunities for unified platforms in Japan: Mobage Town (mobile game town) offers online, web-based and downloadable content that looks a decade old just to function on the widest range of devices. Gree has their ads for the same things running a hundred times a night, no kidding. They both hype their 'all phones compatible!' message, communities, web services and games that are straight out of 2002. The iPhone has fully-3D liquid-smooth Street Fighter IV, Gree is offering Street Fighter I with shitty cellular controls and choppy old graphics.
So sure, you can get a unified app store in Japan, but at the cost of endless TV commercials. And the result is still just one more app store among many. It's not the app store, like Apple offers.
It's progress, sort of. I guess.
BLEARGH