"Empty your pockets." It is the obsession of the telephone industry in Japan. Leaving the house with what you are wearing one morning, your cell phone with you, and returning at night as if nothing had happened. Everything a person uses throughout the day merged into a single device: wallet, watch, keys, money, camera, video, email, etc.
The country's main operators, from the giant NTT DoCoMo to the contenders E-Mobile and Willcom, have entered the race to invent the services of the future. Will the all-in-one succeed? With the cheapest data rates on the planet and 90% of subscribers connected to mobile Internet, it is possible.
Along with South Korea, Japan is the only country where the conversion to 3G is almost total: 89% of cell phones. It is a vital market for wireless technology providers, such as Qualcomm, or terminal manufacturers such as Sharp and Toshiba.
The main operator, NTT, with 50% of the market, wants to go even further and has carried out the first tests with LTE (Long Term Evolution), a fourth generation technology with which transmission speeds of up to 100 megabytes could be achieved. per second.
Europe and the US are lagging behind, both with 28% 3G penetration. While the West timidly enters the era of access to ubiquitous information, Japan is one step away.
There, mobile phones are an essential element in daily life. To access the subway and the bus using built-in magnetic and RFID readers, to find the nearest supermarket or serve as an improvised GPS in the car, when paying the bill in a restaurant or as a method of identification. All this is now possible in the neon capital.
In a few years, the intention is to provide intelligence to the terminal, so that it reacts to the subscriber's preferences and hobbies.
According to Hiroyasu Asami, director of NTT DoCoMo, "the future lies in connecting information with people's daily lives; going from offering data to assisting people in their daily lives." It would be every Japanese dream. A kind of little pocket friend. Where could I eat today? Half an hour before lunch, the mobile phone would automatically send a video message with several suggestions according to our gastronomic tastes and location. He would give us enough time to go to the airport and not miss the booked plane. Or, as we sort through shelves in the supermarket, I would send an MMS with the best offer of the day in the fruit section. High technology for everyday life.
In Europe, the same idea is on the minds of giants like Nokia, some operators and small technology companies. The problem is that until 2012 there will not be enough 3G penetration to do the same things that Japan is up to.
There the difficulty will be very different: adding utilities to phones already crammed with functions without increasing the final cost. Complex. Especially in a country with dozens of manufacturers, proprietary operating systems and offers designed exclusively for a unique culture and customs.
The excessively local component of Japanese telephony leads to the eternal question. Will the new services be exportable to the West? Maybe now there is no way around it. Pushed by the fall in population and market saturation, Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu, NEC and Toshiba are increasingly forced to disembark in other countries.
And NTT DoCoMo also needs to grow once and for all in Europe if it does not want to abandon itself forever in Japan. For everyone, going out will mean opening up to two unstoppable trends: the iPhone and open source platforms led by Android.
The craze for touch screens has not yet caught on on the island. According to a local consulting firm, Apple has barely managed to sell 200.000 units of its iPhone 3G. The touch does not quite convince the Japanese, accustomed to operating the terminals with one hand. But for many it is just a question of price, not design. Samsung and LG, leaders in neighboring South Korea, are betting on touch.
Models like the Omnia or the recently released LG KP500 aim to democratize phones with virtual keyboards. And as for the platform, NTT itself recognizes that adopting open Symbian and Linux (ultimately Android) will be the only way to develop the new generation of functionalities at a reasonable cost.
As things stand, eyes will continue to focus on the line drawn in Japan. In services, design and also in security. Because to transform the mobile phone into a smart mini-computer it will be necessary to handle tons of subscribers' personal information. How to ensure privacy? They have everything thought of: passwords through voice interfaces and unlocking through facial image recognition of the owner or fingerprint readers. The future has only just begun.
If anyone still doubts the power of 3G, they just need to take a look at the Tokyo subway. Quinceañeras buying fashionable jeans, executives monitoring the price of their shares in real time and baseball fans watching their favorite team's game on television. All this through the mobile. Big screens, cheap rates and 3G is all they need.
According to Qualcomm, the company with the most registered patents in 3G standards (W-CDMA and CDMA 2000), there are 670 million third generation subscribers worldwide. In 2012, the figure will increase by 140% to 1.600 billion. It will be at least five years before the 4G technologies being discussed today can be commercialized.
Until then, manufacturers of chips and terminals, operators and Internet companies will fight to design and impose their 3G content and services.
Cellular television, the great promise, is still not taking off in Europe, hampered by the adoption of the D-BVH standard. In Korea and Japan the service is languishing due to the lack of a robust advertising business model to support it.
And in the US it remains to be seen if MediaFlo, the standard promoted by Qualcomm together with AT&T and Verizon, will be able to seduce the masses.
Where the future seems guaranteed is in localization. And, following in Japan's wake, medical payments and diagnoses through mobile phones could be the next goal in Europe. Of course, as long as consumer confidence allows it.
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