I just got back from a trip to Japan, involving time well spent in both Tokyo, one of the very biggest of the big cities, and in Okinawa, on a small jungle island in the middle of the Pacific.

If you have never been to Japan, it really is a good place to visit, with great food, polite, well dressed people who won't beat you down in a back alley or pick your pockets on the underground.

In a way, a perfect exotic adventure for those who prefer their adventures safe and sanitary with not only indoor plumbing but toilets that do a Power on Self Test on boot. Yes, you read that correctly, toilets that POST on boot.

(At right: Tourists using mobile phone in a rickshaw, or jinrikisha.)

Coming back to Mountain View, Calif. seems a bit sleepy, nice weather but a little crumbly, uptight and conservative yet unmaintained. Ahead in some ways, behind in others. Analog toilets, no plastic food in restaurant windows, quiet and dark at night.

(Above: HD Video, 1Seg Digital TV and multimegapixel cameras…)

The phones are different too. Japan has for years been a leading force in mobile innovation, with mobile broadband, both on phones and dongles. 

7.2 HSPDA connections are readily available and cheap, 1seg mobile broadcast TV is omnipresent and highschool kids beam contact info to each other over IR connections. 

The mobile Web is a part of life, and the CueCat dream lives on as QR Code barcodes seen everywhere from subway ads to shopping malls to McDonald’s cups, read instantly from mobile phone cameras.

However, change is in the air. Evolution, which in Japan often runs in frantic, parallel courses where everyone struggles to do the same thing faster, smaller, cheaper and incrementally better, is coming to a halt. The very complexity of these devices and the propriety nature of their development have reached the point where they are unsustainable. Bigger, badder T-Rexes have found meat to be scarce, regardless of how sharp their fangs are. 
 

(Below: QR 2D barcode on a McDonalds cup in Kabuki-cho.)

Device makers, under intense pressure from operators, are consolidating, in effect eating their young to survive. In short, the market and operators are driving the device makers to extinction. Differentiation, increasingly hard to find. This season, solar panels, water proof hardware and HD video recording capabilities are at the top of the list. Next? Who knows.

(At right: Low end Softbank (News - Alert) phone. Note the animated characters for messaging, viewed as important in the Japanese market.)

This is nothing new. Like the Galapagos Islands, mobile evolution in Japan, for a variety of reasons, has moved on a tangent to the rest of the world. Apart, but in many ways better, the technology has become as pervasive as it is advanced. With Japanese hyperphones, there has been no need to look further than the confines of a small island nation and a relatively small subscriber population as the best was known and it was to be found in the display racks of DoCoMo, KDDI and Emobile.

Sure, there were foreign oddities like Windows Mobile and the occasional Blackberry, but for a consumer raised on the local stuff a Windows Mobile device is both lacking and lagging – unstable, slow and lacking in features. BlackBerry devices, while responsive, are also lacking in features common to the market. While both may have offered advantages in terms of the look of the UI over the common featurephone in Japan, performance and bells and whistles held them back. Besides, people there are used to thin but powerful flipphones with Japanese T9 keyboards, an arrangement which works rather well with the language and enables surprisingly rapid input, even one handed. One handed operation is important, particularly if you are standing on the subway and have one hand through a strap.

(At left: The SoftBank Otou-san character, a dog who is inexplicably the father of a family of humans appearing in a series of popular SoftBank tv commercials and other marketing materials.)

Then the comet hit and it came from Cupertino. The iPhone.

While lacking certain features viewed as vital for the Japan market in addition to being completely different to use from the established paradigm, the iPhone is like the coming of the first Apple (News - Alert) Macintosh to the world of DOS machines. Suddenly the old tricks are irrelevant and the new way is smooth, intuitive and slick. Much like when the Honda 750 K0 brought refined four cylinder muscle to a stunned motorcycle world grown used to garbage like the Triumph Bonneville (a machine built by semi-socialist workers more interested in tea time than figuring out a way to cast engine covers out of something other than semi-porous potmetal), the iPhone has changed things completely and reset the bar.

It is much like when the original Mac came to a world where green and amber screens were still common. What a surprise when people found it easier to drag and drop than to do something like “copy /somedirectory/*.* /someotherdirectory/*.*.” What a surprise when it was found that people were willing to pay a premium for this enhanced user experience.

(At right: Come try the iPhone 3G S! Front and center in Akihabara.)

Visiting Akihabara, the district of Tokyo with the largest concentration of consumer electronics in Japan if not the world, the senses are assaulted. Stepping off the train into a crowded station, young women in yellow uniform costumes are pitching electronic kitty litter boxes. Nerds, geeks, anime fans and people of varying levels of social dysfunction (known as Akiba-kei ningen, or Akihabara type people) cluster in great numbers, carrying giant bags of DVDs back to the countryside or hanging out in Maid Cafes (places where young women wearing costumes somewhere between French maid and Sailor Moon serve overpriced coffees and snowcones). Mobile phones are front and center, taking the most prominent places on the first floor of 6-10 story buildings containing nothing but a treasure trove of phones, cameras, PCs, laptops, watches and other assorted preciouses. Entering one shop, on a raised stage right in front of the door, with uniformed demo queen, is the iPhone.

Japan. Not just for advanced feature phones anymore.

Top 10 Handsets, Japan, July 2009

1. Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB (Softbank)
2. Sharp SH-06A (Docomo)
3. Panasonic (News - Alert) 830P (Softbank)
4. Sharp SH-05A (Docomo)
5. NEC (News - Alert) N-08A (Docomo)
6. Sony-Ericsson Premier3 (au)
7. Sharp SH-02A (Docomo)
8. Casio (News - Alert) W63CA (au)
9. Apple iPhone 3GS 16 GB (Softbank)
10. Sharp SH001 (au)