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I’m not a fan of smartphones, to the point that I still don’t own one. I’ve blogged about it a bit. I’m called a Luddite, party-pooper, and worse. I can’t receive emojis, so I’ve grossly misinterpreted a few messages from my friends’ and family’s iPhones. The struggle is real but I assume full responsibility for my technophobic decision.
While the percentage of relatively young Americans with dumbphones (or, more kindly, feature phones) continues to shrink, a growing segment of the Japanese population is embracing them. Phone manufacturers that cater to the Japanese market have recently introduced “smarter” feature phones. (The au GRATINA and Kyocera DIGNO are two examples.) These devices look like run-of-the-mill flip phones, but have enhanced features such as larger screens, cameras comparable to those on a smartphone, Wi-Fi, messaging apps, and wireless charging.
 A Japanese flip-phone comeback seems odd in light of the fact that Japan’s mobile phone development has always been about five steps ahead of the rest of the world. Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo released the first mobile internet service in 1999, a full eight years before the iPhone was introduced in the US. Around 2000, when Americans were first embracing texting on clunky phones with limited features and monochrome screens, Japanese citizens were playing games and surfing the web on souped-up flip-phones. There are several possible reasons for the recent increase in dumbphones and decrease in smartphones, however. First, Japan has a notoriously low birth rate and an aging populace, so it may be that flip-phones with tactile buttons rather than touchscreens are simpler for older people to navigate. And obviously, flip-phones are much cheaper, less fragile, and hold a charge for considerably longer than 24 hours.
The Japanese refer to flip-phones as garakei, a mashup of “Galapagos” and keitai, the Japanese word for cell phone. This might seem like an odd combination (like many Japanese trends appear to the Western mind), but the Japanese often use the term “Galapagos syndrome” to explain their sense of technological and economic isolation. The term was originally developed to describe Japan’s early mobile phone market. Japanese 3G mobile phones were manufactured with a number of specialized features that strongly appealed to the country’s users but were found to be absolutely useless anywhere else, a trend that bears a resemblance to Darwin’s description of evolution in the Galapagos Islands in On the Origin of Species. Also rolled up under the term are the 90% of Japanese ATMs that refuse to accept foreign bank cards; and Kei cars, microvehicles too specialized to be profitable anywhere outside Japan.
Phones like the GRATINA and DIGNO shed light on the fact that US feature phones have remained far too basic to be of much use for anything other than making calls. But the trend of cheap, uncool phones making a comeback in Japan is especially interesting considering the country’s long history with advanced mobile features. While I somehow doubt that dumbphones will ever make a comeback in Western nations, perhaps after a decade of aging and smartphone development we’ll see the same trend.
Image credit: Danny Choo / CC BY-SA 2.0
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