Mobile Design Archive is a new blog where over 400 Japanese cellphone websites screenshot are collected.
Because of historical and security reasons, many mobile websites are not accessible from PCs in Japan, some are blocked by browser IP address, others are referring cellphone unique id. So taking screenshots of mobile sites are not easy as PC websites.
In Japanese web, as on its early stage mobile browsers had many limitations with compact-HTML tags, tiny memory, small screen size and resolution, cellphone websites evolved separately from PC sites. For most companies and services, having two different websites for PC and cellphone were, and are MUST.
Mobile web in Japan is getting more users and page views, making pretty big profit in internet advertisement with great micro-payment platform integrated with cellphone carriers invoice. There are many designing techniques specialized for mobile web. Navigation are also customized for 10 keypads of cellphones.
Mobile web screenshots are sorted out in 35 categories. Each screenshot has a link to the original site (works if the site permits PC access), and QR code for access. It is a good place to get a quick overview of Japanese mobile designs.
