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Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use
For those of us in the West who have so often wondered and envied the immense uptake of mobile voice and internet services in Japan, Mizuko Ito offers a wonderful insight into this particular phenomenon in her paper titled "Personal Portable Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use". (PDF Download) "A strongly recommended read, anyone active in the mobile arena (and not familiar with the Japanese tech culture) should be able to take away some valuable learnings. For instance, I find interesting that the mid-nineties saw a women's "pager craze", which was a precursor for the keitai, the Japanese name for "mobile" or "cell phone". As for the name, Ito says: "In Japanese, the mobile phone is called a keitai, which might be roughly translated as " a portable" or "something you carry with you". In contrast to the "cellular phone" or the "mobile" which stress technology and function, the Japanese term stresses the relation between user and device." reBlogged from TheFeature.com. |
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