No, you're not comparing apples to apples. What NTTDoCoMo is specify everything from the electronics through to the user experience. In other words it is a ho

No, you're not comparing apples to apples. What NTTDoCoMo is specify everything from the electronics through to the user experience. In other words it is a holistic approach. What Verizon does is say to the handset OEMs "slap on some extra icons, applications and a button to your existing experience" if you want to get your phones on our network. It's anything but a holistic approach and simply degrades the original experience the OEM/OS provider made. As referenced in the Quora answer, the carriers in Japan are making good ARPUs and so it is in their interest to be providing the end user with an overall good experience. Verizon, like all of the carriers in the US market, makes slim ARPUs and so from a corporate perspective they are more incentivized to tack on up-sells to increase ARPU which is exactly what all the V-Cast stuff is about. In many ways it's similar to the Apple experience vs Dell (+ all the pre-installed bloatware) experience.