Steve Mollman at Salon looks into whether the US will ever close the technology gap that currently exists between mobile phones and services that exist in Japan and what’s currently available in the US, even as AT&T Wireless touts their new “mMode” service.
For Americans who’ve never been to Japan and played around with an imode handset, there’s really no Stateside parallel to help them understand how enjoyable the experience can be. “I just cringe when I see handsets in America,” says analyst [Mark] Berman. The best analogy may be this: Whereas Japanese handsets are fun, colorful iMacs, those sold in the U.S. are drab, grim DOS terminals.
It isn’t just the phones, or the various wireless technologies at play, Mollman suggests, but also America’s dependence on the automobile. In Japan’s major cities, the reliance of the majority of the population on mass-transportation has created an abundance of what Mollman refers to as “microniches of time” spent waiting for or on trains, time that NTT DoCoMo and the other wireless players has filled with their interactive phones and services.