from the pictures, it appears the fonts
are somewhat small…. not very good for
elderly users like myself….

Then there’s the separation between the “international market” that Apple, Google and Microsoft develop for, and Japan’s domestic market. Take for instance emoji MMS: ubiquitous on all Japanese handsets, and more importantly a cornerstone of Japanese handset usage. But trying to get that same core functionality set up on the iPhone or on Android is a real chore, because neither of those OSes are designed to be compatible with Japan’s unique emoji-MMS-via-email infrastructure. (SoftBank gets around this by setting up servers to handle specifically the iPhone, and even then it’s still buggy; Android relies on 3rd-party emoji apps to properly format and send messages, but works on DoCoMo only; the same problems exist for WM.)

One nice thing about Japanese phones that have these “vanilla” utilitarian OSes is that there’s almost no learning curve. I can pick up almost any phone, press the center button and 0, and grab my contact info (for quick exchange via infrared). Ignoring the lack of an infrared port, I would have to download a separate QR code app on either my iPhone or Milestone and jump through extra menus to accomplish the same task; more if I want to deal with bluetooth pairing.

So really, Japanese handset makers and Apple/Google/Microsoft are playing completely different games. As much as we, the tech savvy, would like to see these handsets paired with better OSes, we aren’t their (DoCoMo, SoftBank, KDDI) main customers. It might make us happy to see Android on a device like the F-04B, but most middle-of-the-road users don’t care (and would probably only care if licensing Android increased the cost of their handsets).

Of course there are plenty of people in Japan who are very interested in a more modern phone OS (relative iPhone and Android popularity shows this), but as long as iPhone/Android/WM devices don’t have the necessary hardware to take advantage of Japan’s keitai infrastructure (1seg, osaifu, seki-gaisen, etc), I feel most users will still be drawn to Japan’s domestic featurephones regardless of OS.

(Plus, and more importantly, the business of importing phones like the iPhone or HTC devices requires heavy subsidization or high point-of-sale costs, another “bag of hurt” that makes potential Japanese buyers think twice.)

You can see firms skinning Android, so its not like Fujistu couldn’t have a nice dash board and Symbian has very good support for non-latin languages.

So sad, 5 years you would expect the future from Japanese phones, now you seem to only have the past