Why mobile lags in the U.S.
Friday, March 9th, 2007I was speaking with some colleagues yesterday about the differences in adoption rates of advanced mobile technology in the U.S. vs. other industrialized nations, specifically Japan.
To me, it comes down to this: it’s not about data prices, network speed, hardware, or killer apps (or the lack thereof). It’s a mindset. In the U.S., no matter how many gadgets we attach to our phones, at the end of the day, we view phones as either just phones or as smaller computers.
In Japan, it’s different. First of all, a camera on a phone is not a camera. It’s a third eye. It’s not just used to take crappy pictures. It can be used as a bar code reader, a text translation tool (really!), a scanner, and whatever else somebody comes up with as an application for the firmware in the device. GPS? Yeah, they’ve had that, oh, for about five years now. Paying for stuff with your phone? At least three years, maybe four.
But it’s not about the apps in Japan either. Mobile techonology is perceived differently. It’s part of the social fabric.
The point is not that Japan comes up with better applications. It’s that the Japanese think of mobiles differently. It’s not a phone, or even a computer. It’s an interface, a fetish in the anthropological sense, in which the web becomes an ambient, context-aware, spirit guide through the world in which the Japanese people have constructed for themselves.
Until Americans move beyond the idea of technology, and especially computers, as just machines that we to whiche we tie ourselves the kind of paradigm-busting adoption (and the apps that follow that adoption) we see in Japan and elsewhere will never happen here. What we have now is just not inspiring to enough people.
