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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

That was pretty much my experience when I visited the place in the summer of 2005. I remember they were just introducing camera phones, and thinking to myself, hasn't the US had camera phones for like 3-4 years now?

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My impression has been exactly the opposite - aside from full-internet on smartphones (not to say it isn't a big deal), new features in the US lag by something like 5 to 10 years. QR code reading and easy contact transfer(like 赤外線) still aren't out-of-the-box features (hacked in by third party software like Bump), and most Americans don't know what a QR code is. We still can't pay for things at the grocery store or buy train tickets with a cell phone, whereas Japan has had FeliCa Mobile for 7 years now. Live TV on a cell phone is also non-existent in the US. In Japan, these are all so common that they're available on the free-with-plan phones.

Also, according to the Japanese Wikipedia article, the first camera phone was DDI(Wilcom)'s VP-210 in 1999, and they exploded in popularity with Sharp's J-SH04 on J-Phone(Softbank) in 2000.[1] The US, by contrast, got their first camera phone in 2002.

[1] http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/カメラ付き携帯電話

QR Code support seems like a software and cultural issue; they have public awareness in Japan and are thus useful. But it's not like most phones don't have the horsepower to read the things.

TV on phones is a matter of the local broadcast technology making it easier to support smaller recievers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg). And also (again) a cultural issue; what's the use case for watching TV on your phone in the states? In Japan, it's so you can watch baseball when you're on the train.

But I'm with you about payment. I got a special iPhone case with a slot for my train card (icoca) just so I could feel modern. :)

The quality was different however. 2D bar codes couldn't really take off in the US until mobiles came with hi-res cameras with macrofocus. As evidenced by the ubiquity of QR in Japan, Japan was pretty far ahead of the US in that regard.

I seem to recall that when I first visited Japan in 2003 and attended a concert, loads of people were attempting to surreptitiously take photos with their mobiles. I don't know what their comparative quality was, but they definitely had cameras on their phones in 2003.

Oh, and flip-phones have been all the rage for as long as I've been going there. I look forward to going back to see if iPhone form factors are gaining popularity yet. You can't swing a dead cat in the US without hitting an iPhone or iPhone knock-off.

They're gaining a little popularity, but most phones are still flip phones. The main reasons I've seen are that the pre-paid and free-with-plan ones are flip phones, and mobile internet is more popular, so a full built-in web browser doesn't give much advantage. Smart phones also usually don't have infra-red contact-info transfer, which frustrates a lot of people, though I don't really think it's hurt sales. They're also usually only in black and white, and lack a good place to put cell phone charms or purikura stickers, which probably kills some of their appeal.

Edit: Also, lack of Live TV is a big one for businessmen who are sports fans. Lack of a FeliCa reader might be an issue for some people, but probably not a deal breaker, since most people probably also have SuiCa, PasMo, IcoCa, or Edy cards.

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