Why Mobile Rules in Asia? Language.

Slashdot is featuring an article on Why mobile Japan leads the world from the Guardian. The article explains the ubiquity of mobile phones and mobile services in Japan is due to “the Japanese genius for designing new technologies that can be adopted by anyone, especially techno-phobes.” Well, I don’t buy it.

The article redeems itself a little by pointing out one of the most obvious differences—economics. The mobile market is regulated very differently in each country and the Japanese system takes some of the burden off the consumer which encourages adoption. The same is true in China. China Mobile has more subscribers than there are people in the US. Part of that is due to just how cheap it is to have a phone in China. It’s much easier in China to simply use pre-paid cards, avoiding expensive and limiting long term contracts as in the US. It doesn’t hurt that China Mobile emerged from a state-run enterprise and still enjoys a near monopoly in the country.

But economics aside, there is something that Japan and China have which the US and Europe mobile markets will never enjoy—languages which work well on cellphones. Have you ever actually tried to browse the internet, in English, on your cellphone? What about reading a book? Western languages don’t fit well on the tiny screens of mobile phones whereas Japanese and, in particular, Chinese are very dense languages when it comes to space on the page (or screen). You can fit a lot more information on a phone screen in Chinese or Japanese than you can in English. The density doesn’t make it any harder to read, like it would in English when you decrease the font size.

And it’s not just in readability that Asian languages excel for mobile phones. These languages enjoy similar advantages over English when it comes to writing on cellphone keypads. I know Japanese friends who say they find writing in their language easier on mobile phones than on qwerty computer keyboards. This is partly due to the nature of the language and partly due to the ingenius input methods on mobile phones.

I’ve seen plenty of other arguments for why cellphone services that blosom in Asia fail to take root in the US and Europe, but personally I’m convinced that language is one of the key factors.