In a joint press conference held this morning, Microsoft, Fujitsu-Toshiba and KDDI unveiled [J] the Fujitsu-Toshiba IS12T smartphone, the world’s very first Windows Phone Mango handset hitting Japan this September only on the KDDI AU mobile network. The phone features a 3.7″ LED display, 1 Ghz Qualcomm MSM8655 CPU,  32GB internal memory, 13.2 Megapixel Camera and is both water and dust proof. While not necessarily revolutionary by hardware standards, the Fujitsu-Toshiba IS12T is the very first smartphone in the world to feature Microsofts latest Windows Phone 7.5 Update (codenamed Mango). Samsung, Acer, and other major smartphone manufacturers also intend to release Mango smartphones late this year / early next year.

As competition and sales heat up between the iPhone and Android market and total smartphone sales skyrocketing  Microsoft is no doubt eager to enter this previously isolated and domestic mobile market. Within the past two years we have see the smartphone transform from an eccentricity of the feature phone dominated mobile market into the top-selling mobile phone category with more than 10 million iPhones and Android handsets in the market.

This exclusivity contract should further benifit KDDI who has been late to joining the smartphone boom, first with Softbank essentially becoming an Apple retail chain with the iPhone (and iPad), and Docomo making a delayed but powerful push with the Samsung Galaxy and the currently ongoing advertising for the Samsung Galaxy II. While there is by no means anything to directly indicate that the Windows Phone could be successful, it will certainly help differentiate the KDDI brand which is still perceived as the cheapest of the three major mobile networks.

This announcement of Microsofts big push with Fujitsu-Hitachi also comes just weeks after Nokia announced they would completely withdraw from Japan. After years of fighting an uphill battle against the feature phone market, Nokia had diminished their offerings to the Vertu series, a luxury mobile phone aimed at high-end consumers. If the Windows phone catches fire the way Android has in Japan, Nokia may have a means and opportunity to give it, yet again, another go.

To help lower the conversion costs for Japanese consumers seeking to move to the Windows Phone, Microsoft has also announced [J] a partnership with Gree to pre-install their social gaming platform into phone. Partnering with these key services will reduce barriers to entry for Japanese who might potentially be interested in the platform. As the new Mango platform offers Internet Explorer 9 with HTML5 compatibility, there should not be any issue running Gree games with their new Flash to HTML5 converter tool provided to developers.

Tags: Japan by Dominic K. Gallello
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You know what copyright mark © means, don’t you?

It should be common for all cultures that young generation try to differentiate themselves by changing their languages from adult. In this case with Japanese teenager girls, they have been using © for totally different purpose since mid 1990′s.

Here is an image from monthly teens’ fashion magazine Loveberry [J]

The model have their name on their side. The letters in braces are nicknames. And their Kanji names followed by ©

This does not mean that they claim copyright on their name. On this magazine, this © means “-chan”, casual form of “-san”, which is a title of respect.

So some young girls who are reading the magazine use © character after their friends’ name on (usually mobile) web, too. It is totally unbelievable even for Japanese adults.

See Also:

“www” has another meaning in Japanese Web

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s largest social networking website Mixi[J] launched a social app service for cellphone users called “Mixi Appli Mobile” on Tuesday.

The app service’s PC edition called “Mixi Appli” was introduced last August, which allows any Mixi users to choose their favorites from a showcase of the apps and to enjoy playing with their social friends online.

Mixi App Mobile presented as much as 104 titles as of its service release, including Bokujo Monogatari (A Story of Ranch) developed by Liveware[J] and Machitsuku (Developing a town) by Unoh.

Mixi App developers need to get their works examined by Mixi prior to presenting them to the users.   Once the examination is passed, the state given for the app will turn from “under development” to “in service”.

According to Mr. Akinori Harada, the head of Mixi service operations and the company’s managing director, mobile access to Mixi’s web-based services share almost 70% of all usages.   Social apps are more compatible with cellphone handsets in terms of the user’s convenience, Harada says.

In order to motivate potential developers to introduce their apps, the company supports them to monetize apps by distributing in-app ads.    The app developer can earn JPY0.01 (USD0.0001) per one impression when presenting in-app ads to the users.   In-app transaction API is to be introduced in early November, and it will allow users to pay money in the app by using Mixi’s user point system.   Corresponding to the amount of the point paid to the app, its developer will be able to get cash after deducting Mixi’s 20% handling charge.

via CNET Japan[J]

See Also:

• Mixi’s Press Release:  App Mobile Launched[J]

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Oct. 29th Update:

Due to the system’s heavy load that the rush of many new users has caused, users have been in technical difficulties to log in to Mixi App Mobile service during the last two days.   Machitsuku, one of the game apps mentioned above, is now ranked the 1st in the number of the app users, and has earned more than 600,000 users in just two days since its release.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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Researchers at IBM Research – Tokyo is working on a way to easily arrange the reading flow of screen readers and mobile devices.

With the visual editor technology they are developing, webmasters can drag-and-drop the connected arrows that will lead the screen reader in an arbrary order. You can even adjust the granularity of the reading order, giving you detailed control or flexiblity.

This new technology not only makes it easier for the visually impared to “listen to” web pages, but also improve the interaction with rich media and non-PC devices. IBM says you can apply this technology to enhance accessibilty and operability of a variety of contents such as PDFs, Flash movies, PowerPoint documents, and web pages on mobile devices.

Tags: Japan, Technology by Naoko McCracken
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As implied by teaser page, Twitter Japan has launched an official Japanese cellphone site http://twtr.jp.

Here is the teaser page changed to a guide page which has both cellphone site URL and QR Code.

The current mobile site http://m.twitter.com/, which is not really usable (it did not work with many of Japanese phone browsers) for Japanese cellphone users, now transferred to this http://twtr.jp, maybe for Japanese users by seeing locale, user agents or IP address (will be cleared soon).

Here is the login page.

And seeing someone’s page.

It was not stable when I saw first time an hour before the Tweetup event, but later, I could play around and felt it is well considered against tricky Japanese cellphone specifications and styles. They are things like proper XML/HTML declaration for different carriers, using embedded style for phones which cannot handle external CSS, short cut digit keys assignment in the same manner as Japanese major cellphone sites, effective emoji usage for better recognition, etc.

The official cellphone site has a great advantage against preceding successful mobile twitter Japanese services such like Movatwitter and Movatter, i.e. no API limitation and direct access to the backend database. I did not expect that Digital Garage did this slick UI from the beginning, but this will surely encourage regular cellphone users to join Twitter.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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