Watch live TV on your phone in Japan

About a year and a half ago I wrote a short article describing the Japanese market as being the spearhead of the mobile Internet world. Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to go to Tokyo for business and see with my own eyes what their mobile technology is like.

The first thing that struck me is the type of phone Japanese users own. As Japan is generally considered to be the cradle of any new digital technology, I expected them all to have state-of-the-art touchscreen devices. But the reality is quite different: the large majority of them own big and thick clamshell-like phones, the market of which is dominated by the manufacturer Sharp.

Interestingly this corroborates what previous research in Japan has highlighted, that Japanese people regard small and thin devices as fiddly and over there, quality is associated with robustness, strong grip and physical controls.

But the main reason why Japanese phones resemble thick bricks is because in addition to being mobile phones, they are also mobile TVs. These clamshell phones are equipped with a large screen and embed a powerful aerial. Consequently, Japanese people can watch live TV on their phones and have been doing so for a while. In Europe and North America, we only started to talk about mobile broadband (4G) very recently thanks to the coming out of the new iPhone. But in Japan, mobile access to high speed Internet has been available for years.

And as a result, Japanese people spend their commute watching the World Cup live on their phone. In Japan at least, *they* have a team to cheer on.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus