Thursday, June 12, 2008
iPhones and Japan
The magazine Wired recently had an article about the proposed release of the iPhone in Japan. I took exception to their view of things, and therefore wrote the following as a letter to the editor:
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Lisa Katayama makes some confusing and contradictory points in her article. It is, of course, true that the level of sophistication of Japanese mobile telephony is several years in advance of the rest of the world. That is, if you measure sophistication in terms of the number of features.
The situation is in some ways analogous to that in the audio industry, where perfect digital sound has been available for some time now, and manufacturers are forced to differentiate through addition of features. The result is that even after the iPod, with its minimalist interface, was released, makers like Sony insisted on adding information such as bit-rate, file size, sampling frequency, filename, etc. to the display on the MP3 player. Meanwhile, the usability of the basic interface was ignored to the point where a new product was introduced at a press launch by the president, and held the wrong way up as a result of poor UI design.
To claim that Japanese consumers are the ones driving creeping featurism is naive and shows a lack of the design and marketing processes at work. While working with a Japanese consumer electronics company, I noticed that new features were often introduced by the engineers, simply because it was possible to introduce them in software (unlike the process with older analog devices), often with no consultation with the marketing arm, much to the dismay of the overseas sales divisions.
As Ms. Katayama points out, the Japanese mobile phone market is further complicated by the fact that phones are not available for general purchase, but are locked to carriers; and makers are competing not for customers’, but for the carriers’ approval in order to produce and sell these phones through the carriers. Even “world standard” phones, such as Nokia (a tiny market share) are locked and crippled to prevent non-standard applications from being added to them. Since the carriers are not users, and not designers, but are in the business of selling bandwidth, it is easy to see that the carriers will invent more and more bandwidth-intensive applications to be implemented by their handset suppliers.
Enter the iPhone - a phone that provides a dedicated flexible keyboard suited to the 4000+ character Japanese language (attempting to enter Japanese on a 12-button keypad is an exercise in frustration) and with a simple user interface that explains itself. Do the geeks interviewed by Ms. Katayama really think that this will not sell in Japan? Again, returning to audio - there was virtually no competition for the Japanese audio industry until the iPod arrived. It’s not that the iPod was cheaper or had more features than the local competition. It was simply that you could use it.
For Japanese customers who routinely get a 300-page manual packed with their cellphone, the iPhone will come as a similar relief. The fact that it is “cool” or “Apple” will help, but cellphones in Japan have taken the place of the video remote and the “blinking zero” syndrome as an example of technology gone wild. The “simple” phones in Japan (ostensibly for older people) sell well. The iPhone, with a similar emphasis on usability, but with the common features used by most Japanese mobile users: voice, mail (but not SMS, impossible between carriers in Japan), Web (and not the
cut-down walled garden “baby Web” of Japanese carriers), location and mapping services (Japan is the country “where the streets have no name”), simple PDA features and music playback, will sell.
My Japanese wife, who is completely non-technical, is counting the days to the iPhone release here. I hardly think she is alone.
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I’d be interested to know what other people feel about the abuse of technology as manifested in the gadgets sold to us every day.