Japan's phones - the wonders of the world ?

Anytime when one looks at advanced phones, the market that most comes into mind. Top non-Japanese phones such as the iPhone, and Nokia's N series don't even come close to the advancement of the phones sold in Japan. It was many years ago that the NTT DoCoMo network had reached 3G capabilities and sold phones that amazed the rest of the world. However, such advancement comes with own problems; trying to pack in so many features and yet meeting goals of being able to make the phone very usable makes the task of designers very difficult. In the end, there is only so much that one can do with the limited number of keys and overall phone size, and the various combinations that Japanese phone makers have come up with to provide the range of applications available can confuse the most advanced of users. If you remember the old joke about not being able to set the time on the VCR, this is way beyond that. Get a glimpse of how things actually are:

Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master. "There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,'" says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo. Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is "good for killing time during a long commute," Aoki says, "but it's definitely not elegant."
Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all. Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.

In contrast, phone makers such as Apple and Nokia have been behind on the feature list, but are seemingly way ahead on making phones look good and be very usable.