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Comment by fosap | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, at least I think so, the Japanese are using emails instead of text messages on their mobile phones.

Text Messages: One of the worst, and still the most popular IM systems.

This wasn't because of some sort of advanced thinking on the part of the Japanese. They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence.

In fact, the use of email on phones has resulted in people continuing to use their carrier's email service instead of migrating towards Gmail and other device-agnostic services that also have a lot more features.

> They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence.

Not sure how to interpret this ....

SMS works fine on all Japanese cellphones, between carriers, and even to other countries (I've texted to someone in Korea, though only ascii was really reliable... CJK characters sometimes worked, but sometimes got trashed).

Because of the encoding used (some variant of ISO-2022-JP with custom code points for emoji), and probably some additional metadata, the maximum length of messages is reduced; for instance, on my phone, it's 100 ascii chars, or 50 CJK characters or emoji.

However, Japanese can be very dense, much denser than English on a character-count level, depending on which words you use, so the smaller character limit isn't always a horrible limitation.

The main issue is that things like verb conjugations and polite forms can realllly bloat things up, increasing word lengths dramatically. So there's constant pressure when using SMS in Japanese to (1) use very informal language, (2) be grammatically incorrect, and (3) use emoji for everything...

But hey, texting is generally between friends anyway, so the above aren't such a problem, and indeed, probably add to the sense of informality, which can be a good thing.

Inter carrier SMS messages in Japan were not possible until recently (July 2011, or about ten years behind other countries). This had to do with some of the Japanese carriers adopting PDC as a 2G standard instead of something that was used more internationally (eg. CDMA).

To allow customers to communicate via text with friends with other carriers, Japanese carriers adopted email on their phones and the Japanese customers became more familiar with email instead of SMS for text.

These days more and more Japanese are using applications like Line to exchange short messages with each other. This is increasing in part because smartphone numbers are increasing rapidly and the "gala-kei" phones are dying out.

In my experience the provider-based email addresses seem to be used mostly as a way to confirm other service's accounts, and that sort of thing.

(An article with numbers supporting this: http://www.startup-dating.com/2013/02/smartphone-penetration...)

Phones do come with email addresses, and that's primarily used instead of text messages, but there is SMS/MMS (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what Softbank's S!Mail is, though, I get the impression it's mostly just used in-network, by people on family plans). Also, Naver's 'Line' is particularly popular for messaging right now.

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