Japan Mobile Market Overview

Interesting arcticle at Techcrunch, providing a high level summary of the advanced state of mobile web adoption in Japan and the specific situation in the country. It is a common prognosis for the western markets that in the foreseeable future the mobile web will overtake the desktop-based web. This prognosis has been around for a long time – longer than the 5 years I have now spent in the mobile industry – yet we are just beginning to see some more serious adoption rates in the US / EU markets now. It is always exciting for me to hear about a country where this future is already a reality. Case in point is one of the comments to the above article:

When I went to Japan last year, we stayed at a relative’s house. He had recently bought a laptop, which sat in the main room. One evening, I asked one of his two teenage daughters whether it would be OK if I looked up some flight times on the laptop. She said she didn’t know if you could do that. I asked if she meant it wasn’t on broadband. In fact she meant she literally *didn’t know* whether I could do that on a PC. She knew she could on her phone of course, and offered me the information on that. It was clear that she had never actually used a PC to access the net and I was somewhat blown away by that.