Re: WAP and mobile phone Internet access / Sep 17th

Mark,

Interesting - and I agree with 99.9% of what you say,
but it's only maybe 30% of the story.

One point where I disagree is regarding Kanji. It's true
that one Kanji (2-byte) character can express a whole
concept, but if you look at real text, then English and
Japanese text occupies about the same space. 

However, there are some additional factors: Japanese
companies in this area use different marketing, 
different technical implementations and different 
business models. Some of this you'll find discussed
in our imode-FAQ:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq.html

Best regards,

Gerhard Fasol
Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
http://www.eurotechnology.com/
fasol@eurotechnology.com


Mark Griffith wrote:
> 
> /
> /
> 
> So why does Japan have a lead in WAP and i-mode?
> 
> I can imagine the Japanese _do_ implement better, and
> I am sure the extra time on cramped trains is a major
> element (though Europeans make up for it hanging
> around at cafes, don't they?).  Japan is also a rich,
> gadget-happy country with a quarter more people than
> Germany.
> 
> Their homes being too cramped, and dial-up home access
> being too dear, for PC-Internet use from home to take
> off is another element in Japan's early start surely.
> 
> But the one reason everyone seems to be forgetting is
> that you can fit more information on a mobile-phone
> screen if your language uses compact ideograms - as
> Japanese, Chinese, and often Korean, does.
> 
> One or two ideograms can represent a word that may
> cost three or four times as many characters in any
> alphabetical language.
> 
> I am guessing, but it might be possible to write my
> previous sentence in as few as twenty ideogram
> characters in Japanese (though they also have the
> option of alphabetical writing).  Even at double the
> width of alphabetical letters, that would be forty
> character widths compared to the space I actually took
> up in the one-sentence paragraph above - over 95
> characters - and that was in English, a relatively
> concise language by European standards.
> 
> When screens get bigger and faster that difference
> will erode, but we may be in one of the few
> two-or-three-year periods in recent history when our
> alphabet-only languages have a clear disadvantage that
> matters in business.
> 
> It might mainly be that mobile-phone screens right now
> are just fun enough and quick enough to be worth using
> if you have a language with ideograms, and not if you
> don't.
> 
> Best wishes, Mark Griffith
> 
> Manchester / Amsterdam / Budapest
> /
> /
> 
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Received on Saturday, 16 September 2000 19:56:11 UTC