Irina Sandu

• SMS is quasi non-existent, email is being used instead.

• When getting a subscription, an email address comes with it
• Phone decoration is very common.
• ~75% of the population owns a mobile phone
• Japanese phones are designed at a hardware and software level to work with only a particular network.
• NTT DoCoMo is the predominant mobile phone operator. Its name comes from “do communications over the mobile network“
• au by KDDI and SoftBank (formely Vodafone Japan) are the other major mobile operators
• Osaifu-Keitai is the de facto standard mobile payment system
• The Mobile FeliCa (Felicity Card) is used for electronic money, authentication, loyalty card, fare collection of public transits or as a credit card.
• The first commercial launch of a mobile-specific browser-based web service was in 1999 in Japan when i-mode was launched by NTT DoCoMo.

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