The autumn crop of keitai denwa (cellular phones) has been announced by Japan’s major phone makers, so I thought I’d revisit the subject. The iPhone continues to be a hit here — you can’t stand on a train platform in Tokyo without seeing three or four people using them — but Android is slowly picking up steam as companies embrace it. One feature of the Japanese phone market has been a great differentiation between handsets, as companies made unique phones for all types of people, and I was afraid the “Coke vs Pepsi” nature of the smartphone wars take away a lot of this uniqueness. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though, and there are Android-based phones with large HD camera embedded in them, stylish phones made with women in mind, ruggedized phones and waterproof phones, phones that act as digital wallets and receive “WanSeg” TV, simpler phones with GPS for children or elderly users…there are even clamshell-style Android phones, since the Japanese can type rapidly using a traditional phone keyboard. There’s a downside to this variety in phone sizes and shapes: the lack of “critical mass” of any one phone (especially phones that are available outside Japan) means that finding anime cases like the kind we carry for the iPhone is much more difficult (but we’re trying).
Choice is good, but too many unique phone styles means no Evangelion cases from J-List T_T
