Why has Japan had better mobile phones than the United States?

In addition to the points raised in the Quora link, I think a lot of the reason US didn't innovate was because other than the NE corridor there isn't a public transport culture like there is in Japan and Europe - where people will sit on a train for 45 minutes and watch TV or engage with apps (and thus be prepared to pay for them).

Sure the iPhone and Android have bought app culture to the US but I bet the amount of engagement they receive is much shorter than in Europe and Asia.

Here in the US I think a lot of Apps are task oriented - "I want to find a restaurant nearby"... 30 seconds later the app is closed and done. In Europe I might be on a train for half an hour so I'll engage with a video-on-demand app... I'll watch 5 news clips and read two articles which might be 10minutes + usage.

During a trip to Tokyo a few years back, I got to see some of the "advanced" phones up close: big, clunky, and plastic. The majority of phones are flip, with very few smart phone users.

There is a big difference in what the Japanese want out of phones for sure though. While we're fixated on Internet access and applications to pass the time, the biggest seller of phones in Japan is the ability to watch TV through 1seg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-seg

Wikipedia has another really interesting article on cell phone culture in Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_mobile_phone_culture

NTT is a telecom, and analogous to one of our companies: Verizon. They specify things to all manufacturers too, but things like V-Cast and buttons that "accidentally" launch the internet on their phones.

I think this has less to do with the "closed model" Evans idolizes, and more with a culture that embraces technical innovation, even at the corporate level. (Remember, he's ex telecom.)

Before the iPhone, Japanese mobiles were definitely a step ahead, but now that the iPhone, and its Android competition, are thriving around the world, everything that isn't one of the above feels about ten years behind.

Classic Japanese mobile phones don't support Javascript. Or cookies. A large number of handsets don't allow images at all on pages with SSL, or stylesheets of any kind -- you have to specify CSS in-line, with the 'style' attribute on each element you want to style.

Native apps exist, but if you want to develop them, be prepared to spend a shocking pile of money.

None of this holds for the iPhone or Android-derived devices over here, but those are no better then their foreign counterparts.

In terms of features, the only truly useful thing that I can think of that Japanese mobiles have is mobile Suica -- it's nice to be able to have your commuter pass integrated with your phone. Charging it up with cash can be a pain in the ass, as the web-based tools are crap, but it's nice nonetheless.

The typical phone was a long skinny thing with a tiny elongated screen and dozens of impossibly tiny buttons crammed together to make something like a keyboard. They had cameras of inferior quality, inferior internet access, etc. I'll grant that some of their phones had things like NFC, but that's the exception that proves the rule. And my, was my little touchscreen phone popular with the ladies.

Its hard to disagree that Apple alone has completely shaped what it means to be a smartphone in the last 4 years. Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone 7 did not exist before iOS came out. Android has become the marginal market leader in the last 6 months or so in terms of overall phones sold, but that's a fragmented OS market now. The WebOS phones failed, and WP7(a pretty cool OS, imho) is having trouble getting traction. Right now, biggest and most unified smart phone market is simply iOS.

But to put everything into perspective, the model described by in the QP is remarkably similar to Apple's model in many ways. About 10 years ago, DoCoMo said "these are the specs that you will support on your phones", and because DoCoMo had the marketshare of customers, that's what happened. In the US, you don't see a red Verizon logo on the iPhone, right? Apple controls the software and hardware, aka "the specs" of their phones. They have dictated what the carriers will support for things like Visual Voicemail.

The sad part is that DoCoMo seems to have been innovating for a while, which helped give Japan (Tokyo?) the cache of having the best phones in the world. However, that hasn't been true for a long time and now the most popular phones in Japan are iPhones.

Some aspects of Japanese cell phones were better than some aspects of American phones. Simplifying it to DoCoMo having a lot of sway is, IMO, ignoring an awful lot. Tokyo has tremendous population density. Demand was high for mobile Internet access because not everyone has the space for a home computer, and people spend a lot of time out and about. People send emails like mad because it's cheaper and because it's more polite than yelling into your handset while on the train. Payment chips got integrated because the local McDonald's might pass a hundred times the number of customers per day than your local American one.

Of all the things driving Japanese cell phone technology, the ones listed seem pretty minor. Give that sort of focused demand to US carriers and I think you'd see far faster adoption of specific technologies.

By the way, my Japanese cell phone has a built-in TV receiver and recorder. And as near as I can tell, SoftBank voicemail isn't voicemail at all; it's an actual answering machine built into my handset. Weird.