The iPhone Charms Japan

[Maura]

MSNBC.com has a feature today on the significance of the iPhone’s popularity in Japan, where it has successfully managed to gain a foothold in an industry notoriously difficult for outsiders to penetrate. According to MSNBC.com, Japan’s mobile phone industry has been nicknamed Galapagos because of its isolated nature, running on a network on which many Western phones won’t work, which is why Japanese airports have as many cell phone rental kiosks as they do car rental kiosks. Apps favoured by the Japanese tend to be more quirky and localised, according to MSNBC.com, which is why foreign app developers have tended to ignore the Japanese market. Until now, that is, with the huge success of the iPhone in Japan. You will now see people all over Japan using the iPhone – on trains, in cafes, everywhere, and the Japanese are lapping up the apps, with one interviewee saying that she already has 35 apps on her iPhone, which is decked out in a sparkly Hello Kitty case. Even the ubiquitous Angry Birds is just as much a hit in Japan as it is in the rest of the world.

“Japanese are well-educated. They will pay for applications,” Brian Lee, a manager at Taiwan-based app developer Penpower Inc. told MSNBC.com. “A lot of developers are coming into this market.”

It’s also hoped that more and more Japanese developers will start getting involved in developing apps, both for the Japanese market and abroad, which can only be a good thing, with Japanese developers being responsible for some of the greatest video games ever made, for example, I bet they could come up with some amazingly innovative apps.

Source: MSNBC Japan iPhone craze attracts global app developers - Technology & science - Wireless - msnbc.com