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> Japanese phones were WAY ahead of the West for absolutely forever. Not really. Fun fact: In the early 1990s, the largest cellphone brand in Japan was Finnis
by 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
> Japanese phones were WAY ahead of the West for absolutely forever.
Not really. Fun fact: In the early 1990s, the largest cellphone brand in Japan was Finnish company Nokia, and Nokia lost its edge there mostly because you could only sell phones through operators and the suppliers played dirty: for example, they refused to sell Nokia color LCD screens.
Now Japanese phones in the late 1990s were indeed the bees knees, but they were incompatible with the rest of the world (PDC/i-mode instead of GSM/WAP/GPRS), they missed the boat on 4G as well (NTT FOMA was the first out the gate, but not standard), and when the iPhone came along it was too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
- jbay808 6y agoEven through the late 2000s, Galapagos phones were way more advanced in terms of capabilities than anything available in the west, including the first couple of iPhone generations. Trouble is, they wouldn't or couldn't sell them anywhere else, and eventually the rest of the world outpaced them and ate their lunch. Yes, the radio standards were incompatible... Would it have been so hard to make an international model? I think they just didn't feel like they needed to. This pattern keeps happening where Japanese companies develop amazing products for their domestic market, and then staunchly refuse to bother selling them elsewhere, allowing global competitors to win in the long term.