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Most North Americans turn their cell phones on when they are out of the house and office, when they cannot be reached on a landline. This keeps their wireless minutes down and service providers don't make a lot on causal users of cell phones (<150 min/month). If cell phone providers allowed alternative long distance services on their lines, people might be more persuaded to drop their landlines and go completely to their cell phones. But only one service provider in Canada offers long distance rates that are even close to what you can get on a land line. The rest of them charge 2.5X or more than you would pay on a landline AND you still have to watch your airtime minutes.

This article takes a closer look into how demand and consumerism drive the Japanese cell phone market. Many people turn to the Japanese market to see what features and services might appear in North America in the near future. Read on to see what you might expect your future cell phone to offer.

The Japanese Market

Jump off the train at the Akihabara neighbourhood of Tokyo. This is a very famous electronics district, filled with computer shops, camera stores, film wholesalers, and more. Looking for that replacement part? You are guaranteed to find it somewhere here.

Almost every single store has booths outside with dozens of phone models. Go to one of the street corners pick up some silver FOMA (Freedom Of Mobile multimedia Access) kleenex from a cute girl -- free advertising for NTT DoMoCo's new high-speed data services. Go inside some of the larger electronics stores and there might be a half floor devoted just to cell phones and the other half of the floor will be cell phone accessories. Sure, there will be a few car chargers and replacement batteries, but most of the accessories are things that make the phone unique -- faceplates, holograms, interchangeable LED covers, fuzzy cases, stick-on antenna characters, and things to hang off your antenna. It's not just the electronics district, but everywhere you go there are cell phone stores with dozens of cell phone models for sale. And why not, seeing that almost everyone owns one and everyone likes to have the latest phone out there. New phones might sell upwards of ¥60000 (US$300), but a phone that is a few months out of date can be had for about ¥1200 (US$7).

Akihabara is one of the biggest electronics shopping districts in the world.

Japan is dominated by three service providers. There's KDDI who provides a service called "AU", NTT's "DoMoCo", and Vodafone's "J-Phone". Each provider offers various different services and rate plans and different coverage areas outside the urban centres. Phones used by all providers are virtually incompatible with any other cellular service in the world. A combination of CDMA and unusual frequencies makes almost all phones sold in Japan useless to the outside world. Don't expect your overseas phone to work in Japan either. Some of the Japanese service providers do offer international roaming services, such as AU's "World Passport" that does allow limited CDMA roaming in Hong Kong, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada (on Telus Mobility only) and a few service providers in the U.S. There's dozens of phones to choose from with each service provider. You'll regularly see phones made by Sharp, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Kenwood, Toshiba, NEC, Denso, Pioneer, Sanyo, Kyocera, Hitachi, Casio, and Sony Ericsson. Phones made by big-name companies, such as Nokia, seem to have very little market share.

Coverage is very important. Microcells are very common and fill in small coverage holes.

Only recently have colour screens been introduced to the North American market. Sprint PCS ran a series of commercials in the summer of 2002 bragging about their all new colour screen phone. Telus Mobility offered a coloured handset to the public in late 2001. But as of today almost all phones in North America still have monochrome screens. Ironically only a handful of phones sold on the Japanese market are monochrome, and these are often for use outside Japan on either CDMA or GSM networks.

There's also a few regular, non-clamshell, phones on the Japanese market. These also feature full colour screens, but they are not as popular due to the size of the phone to accommodate both the screen and the keypad. Small phones are definitely not common, the idea behind Japanese phones is to make the screen as big and colourful as possible and have an easy-to-navigate keypad for messages, games, and more.

Messages Messages between friends in Japan is big. You can do regular SMS or email on your phone. Email is of course limited to small file sizes, but many of the phones allow for both English and Japanese characters to be sent. Each provider also allows special characters to be sent, such as an array of happy and sad faces, small animated images, animals, people, hearts, etc. When special characters are not available, people often use a specialized set of faces to show emotion: Email can also be sent between between different provider phones, but many of the special characters are lost, hence to try and keep your circle of friends on the same provider to receive the special characters. Email, of course, may be sent from computers as well, but files are often stripped of headers and attachments.

ASCII faces

Most North American phones come with a few games to keep people entertained for a limited duration. Japanese phones come with two different types of games: built-in ones and Java application ones. The built-in ones are simple, but again the graphics are very important to the game value. The two images on either side of this paragraph show a couple of the built-in games, including a SIM game and a Egg Catch game. Not exactly on the same level as the traditional Nokia Snake game. Java application games are delivered via the network to your phone and there is a charge for this service. These games are much more complex and require streaming data to access. You can play Role Playing Games (RPG's), fashion design, complex Tetris and more. New games come out monthly. You can even buy joysticks and navigation consoles that plug into your phone.

If that's not enough, how about downloading a short video starring Winne the Pooh? A little karaoke perhaps? How about that boring screen on the phone? You can even download beautiful animated colour screensavers from commercial services to place on your phone. Surf a few web sites in full colour and with animations. Pop in a 64 Meg compact flash card and listen to a few hours of MP3 on your cell phone. Pay your parking fees online. The fun just doesn't stop.

Built-in Cameras One of the recent popular additions to many of the Japanese phone models is a CCD Camera that is mounted either on the outside of the clamshell or on the clamshell hinge. The camera lens is slightly smaller than a dime and takes 4x4 cm pictures to display on the phone's screen or to send to others. Not only can you take pictures, but you can take video clips. Most phones take between 5-15 seconds of footage due to memory limitations, but you can send streaming video over your phone. Many of the advertisements for camera phones show people taking to each other and watching each other on the screen (both holding the phone and camera at arms length and using a hands-free microphone and earpiece). This might be cute at the beginning, but most people end up focusing the camera on a tree or street scenes and talking normally with the phone next to their head. Otherwise a very neat feature, and excellent at showing someone what is going on where you are. The camera also has a couple of neat accessories that you can get, including an external flash that pops into an accessory port. You can even buy a miniature printer that will print out your pictures.

Camera pictures

To incorporate yet another gadget into cell phones, many of the phone manufactures are now including a built-in GPS unit. The user can put the phone into GPS mode and determine their position. Base maps can be either downloaded or loaded with streaming data to give a background of streets, terrain, or just about anything else. GPS does have its limitations, with the big one being that you need to be able to receive good signals from at least three satellites to determine a position. This is easy in an open environment, but not inside buildings or along narrow streets with little opening to the sky above. Regardless, service providers promote that GPS-enabled cell phones can help you find your friends by sending your current position to them. On the screen a basemap will appear and customized icons, such as a little Hello Kitty, will appear where your friend's cell phone is or of a building that you need to go to. It's a neat idea, but it is a very basic GPS unit with limited waypoints and functions.

Conclusions

All the services offered on Japanese phones cost money, either up front for the feature or as a airtime or data charge. Owning a basic cell phone in Japan costs about US$40 a month, but costs can quickly rise with additional features, more airtime, streaming data, email and messages. Users of cell phones in Tokyo especially have to watch out for their phone ringing once with a unknown number -- dial that number back out of curiosity and you'll reach the equivalent of a 1-900 number in North America with high per minute costs for adult entertainment. What will we see in the near future in North America? Colour screens are on the way, maybe video cameras and streaming java games. Likely GPS-enabled phones and streaming movies would not be a big hit if they were introduced to the North American market, simply because there are better devices currently available if you want to determine your position on earth or watch a movie. Who knows what else will show up on your next cell phone? Stay tuned...

Phone accessories for ¥100.

Further Reading