Reading this news about a TV tuner adapter for the iPhone in Japan reminded me to blog some observations about Japan culture and cellphones. I have been lacking in my Japan blogs lately haven’t I? Too many Xbox blogs I guess.

Japan, being all super-high-tech; I would have expected there to be some crazy cellphone technology going on. Remember, these were the people that had 3G while we were still using horse and buggies. But aside from the prototype phones I saw at the KDDI Design Studio, I was not impressed! Their phones worked pretty much like ours, except every phone had a rotating thingy which let them view their screen horizontally. Why did they want to do that? So they can watch TV! On the subway, there are as many people watching TV on their cellphones as there are people listening to their MP3 players here in North America. Mobile TV never took off here, but apparently it’s very popular in Japan.

The Japanese were also not as obtrusive in their cellphone use. You would never be able to hear all the intimate details of a person’s life by being in the same subway car as them. Although I guess that’s typical of being Japanese, and if it’s not, it’s somewhat enforced by the by-laws (no cellphone use in certain areas). I saw a lot of people texting away though; that seems to be the communication method of choice.

One cool thing that I’ve never seen anywhere else were these bar code type things. Apparently they’re called QR Codes (thanks Wikipedia!). Here’s a picture of one from one of our hotel’s mirrors:

These were everywhere, and act like URLs. In fact, everywhere there would have been an URL, you just had one of these icons. What you’re supposed to do is take a picture of the code, and it would tell your cellphone to go to a specific (mobile) page. It’s much more convenient than typing into your 9-button keyboard. That’s something that we can adopt here in Canada.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: cellphones, japan, webgeek