Nokia Starts Shipping iPhone Competitor, Gives Up On Trying To Keep Pace With Japan

Neatly serving to show just how wide the gulf is between Japan and the rest of the world when it comes to mobile phones, Nokia has today started shipping its fancy iPhone competitor called the Music Xpress 5800, as well as announcing that it is no longer going to sell its handsets in Japan. Music, touchscreen, 8GB memory, blah blah blah, if you want to read a sycophantic acme of the press release about the new phone and what it can do then head on over to Marketwatch here.

Rather embarrassingly though, Nokia announced just last week that it was going to take on Japan’s three biggest mobile operators and provide phone services as well as handsets, but we can presume that all that’s been chucked out now. It will however carry on providing its conspicuous-consumption handset brand Vertu, which makes sense as you’ve got Japanese still dropping £83,000 on Tiffany-encrusted phones amid the crisis.

So why can’t Nokia, which has a 37% global market share in handsets, break into Japan? Well, that’s because while we coo over touchscreens and headphone jacks, Japan’s handset culture resides in some epilepsy-inducing manga futureworld where phones look like Transformers, can predict earthquakes, translate your voice into English, understand and display your emotions, and have telly pretty much as standard, let alone internet.

Best of all, while Barclaycard is introducing its contactless cards with that lovely waterslide advert, Japan went one better years ago by sticking the technology in mobile phones. So you can set it to automatically recharge via the internet, can buy tickets online and keep them on your phone…basically it means you never have to have a wallet again and lose all track of the money you’re chucking into electronic wells left and right.

My phone doesn’t even have a camera. If I lived in Japan I’d probably be put in a museum. Or a zoo.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | November 27, 2008 3:57PM |