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Japan had a strong flip phone ecosystem back when iPhone happened. Contactless payment, lootbox microtransactions, music downloads, GIF emojis, TV broadcast, mu

Japan had a strong flip phone ecosystem back when iPhone happened. Contactless payment, lootbox microtransactions, music downloads, GIF emojis, TV broadcast, multicore CPUs, Linux-based OS, biometrics, >326ppi displays before iPhone 4, 3x mechanical zoom, literally everything. Sadly the industry was focusing razor sharp on political infighting and was just building up crufts, and so the UI/UX was beyond atrocious - it was not simply outdated, the entire ecosystem was user hostile. That and downright illegal quota enforcement from Apple wiped it out. Two major mistakes made by Japanese phone manufacturers was that they didn't ship the phones globally from being scared to death with language barriers, and that no one cared about horrible organizational mess. They had a decade and half to make MOAP(L) work out as a usable touchscreen OS that runs on Renesas SH processor with Toshiba DRAM and paired with a Fujitsu modem, they didn't take that route and instead spent that engineering man-hours on processing PDF file returned from payment gateway on a phone, and let it all bleed out. IIUC, Korea was in an almost exact same situation. They managed to come out of it. Japan could not.

SunlitCat 2y ago
That's something wondering me as well. Japan had so much cool things way back in the 2000's (even late 90's I think?). Internet on mobile phones was thing (I think it was called iMode or so). Those flip phones were awesome and way more convenient then those bricks back then over here (I still have my international version of an NEC flip phone I bought in mid-ish 2000's somewhere around. It even had iMode access, albeit pretty useless here). I still wonder what could have happened, if Japanese companies pushed their phones (and technology) more worldwide. Well, we will never know.
- treflop 2y ago
  Don’t forget that the US had Internet on mobile phones in the 90s/2000s too. It was called WAP. However it was expensive as shit. I’m glad that both WAP and i-mode failed and we got the real Internet though.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    WAP networks were basically same technology, but were way sparse and underutilized in content and market cap compared to i-mode/EZWeb/Yahoo! Keitai. I think that content density disparity still exists today. The Western Internet is kind of content lean.
bamboozled 2y ago
This is a pretty good article that talks about other reasons for everything going awry in Japan regarding software: https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-killed-japans-software-industry/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-k...

SunlitCat 2y ago

That's something wondering me as well. Japan had so much cool things way back in the 2000's (even late 90's I think?). Internet on mobile phones was thing (I think it was called iMode or so). Those flip phones were awesome and way more convenient then those bricks back then over here (I still have my international version of an NEC flip phone I bought in mid-ish 2000's somewhere around. It even had iMode access, albeit pretty useless here). I still wonder what could have happened, if Japanese companies pushed their phones (and technology) more worldwide. Well, we will never know.

treflop 2y ago
Don’t forget that the US had Internet on mobile phones in the 90s/2000s too. It was called WAP. However it was expensive as shit. I’m glad that both WAP and i-mode failed and we got the real Internet though.
- numpad0 2y ago
  WAP networks were basically same technology, but were way sparse and underutilized in content and market cap compared to i-mode/EZWeb/Yahoo! Keitai. I think that content density disparity still exists today. The Western Internet is kind of content lean.

bamboozled 2y ago

This is a pretty good article that talks about other reasons for everything going awry in Japan regarding software: https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-killed-japans-software-industry/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-k...