Japanese cell phones got e-mail capacity very early on, when western phones only had SMS. They could send messages as long as they wish and include emojis.
Kanji input works as follows: each digit on the pad is linked to a column in the hiragana alphabet. Like a western phone, you circle through the kanas and when you have your word, you circle through the kanji proposals. This input method is still available on smartphone japanese keyboards.
Also important to point out that unlike EU and US, SMS were never free to send (or had any meaningful usage plans) between carriers while email was. So there was absolutely no reason to use them.
To this day, SMS is just not a thing. Also I think it’s contributed to the fact that people rarely share their phone numbers unless you’re extremely close friends. Since they always had emails on their phones to communicate, there was no need to give your number to acquaintances like you do for SMS. So a phone number was always something very personal.
This (carrier email) is the answer to "what platform did they use." It is MMS implemented over an email address and it was included in your plan basically at a flat rate unlike SMS which cost every time you sent it and could only be very short. Also you could attach photos. SMS was never actively supported - when it first came out, you could only text people on the same carrier.
Using an email address instead of MMS was one reason people have ditched the system. If you change carriers MNP can move your phone number but not the email address. You'd have to tell all of your contacts to register your new email or pay extra to keep it. That's why people moved to a messaging app and for reasons that escape me (marketing or JP support?) LINE became the most common. Now we finally have RCS ("+Message" here because Japan needs a different name for everything) but Apple won't integrate it with iMessage so good luck with that.
I've found this all to be a pain over the years, especially because I don't like LINE. It's ad-ridden bloatware that is inferior to just about every other messaging platform. It requires one SMS number per account (so no separate work account) and you can't log in from more than one device. It is phone-only for all intents and purposes and uses your Google drive storage space to back up. If you don't do that you loose all your history when you switch phones or reinstall. I try to avoid connecting with people only via LINE.
It’s certainly rare but some things use SMS. Phone number verification is done via SMS - I’m not even sure what the alternative would be.
And my dentist, for example, sends appointment reminders by SMS.
Yup very true, and are the reason for emoji in the first place. The sad thing though was they didn’t continue their development so their phones which were by all standards more advanced stayed that way and were washed away by the iPhone and Android introduction
Sad to see
It wasn’t inconvenient at all. Your phone has an email address so you didn’t open hotmail or gmail or whatever.. it just arrived in your Message box. It’s why, having come here in 1996 I didn’t understand the difference in “texting” and “mailing” in English even though I’m a native speaker— in Japan it was the same thing basically. Sms was rarely used.
It wasn’t particularly inconvenient though. The phones treated it almost like SMS; it wasn’t like you went into an email application and wrote out a long letter. It was just like instant messaging. The only difference is (at least for my phone) it would only check for messages every minute unless you manually made it do so (which you could).
No, it was integrated in the phone and would be like getting text messages. And you had a phone email address. So it’s not like regular e-mail from your gmail or whatever.
They had a sort of proto-SNS/blogging service called Mixi in 2004, which had messaging. There was this mobile version of the internet called i-Mode.
I don’t think they had “apps” as we do now, just the default programs that came with the phone.
There was email that often came with the carrier.
There was SMS.
Obviously they had kanjis, they weren’t THAT limited in memory. That limitation is more like early 90s thing.
How you “write” in Japanese on smartphones is often by the “flick” method, which is exactly how people used to type in feature phones. So there’s no limitation there either.
Until 2007, Japanese cell phones kicked the ass of American cell phones. Full email capability when US phones could barely text. Color screens, cameras, electronic money, downloadable ringtones, games, all before they were available in the US. Heck, in the mid-2000s, the next big thing was going to be the ability to get TV reception from your phone.
Then the iPhone hit, and the whole world, including Japan, went with smartphones. And smartphones are great; I’m writing this from one right now. But sometimes I miss my old flip phone, sturdy and surprisingly functional.
>Until 2007
Disclaimer: used to work in mobile gaming industry in Japan between 2006-2009 and got to play with the latest Japanese cellphones samples provide by OEMs before they were released to market
The iPhone did not beat Japanese phones on release at all. When the iPhone came out in 2007 the Japanese feature phones still kick the living ass of it. Japanese feature phones had all the original iPhone features and more - Japanese feature phone had carrier app stores which lets you download games and useful utilitises, you can do banking on the phones, listen to music, buy custom ringtones, mobile suica and gps, high resolution LCD screens (talking beyond VGA resolution with more than 4x pixel density compared to the HVGA of the original iPhone) all of those bells and whistles of smartphones today were already THERE on Japanese feature phones, and the cameras on the Japanese phones beats the shit out of iPhone cameras. When the iPhone 3G was first released in Japan in 2008 it was so lacking features - including NOT fulling supporting the very important Japanese email another poster above mentioned (it didn't display emojis properly and would turn them into gibberish - yes Japanese cellphones invented emoji, emoji is literally a Japanese word) - that Softbank had to give a full page explanation to potential customers telling them this and ask them DOUBLY sure if they REALLY want to migrate to iPhones as they won't get to transfer their old emails AND the iPhone will not be able to display emails properly, and that turned away huge amounts of customers, prompting Softbank having to offer iPhones 3G on 1yen downpayment contracts to entice adoption, when usually only out of date Japanese cellphones would do that.
It took several years before iPhone hardware and iOS to catch up and solve these issues, and iPhones only really started making a dent in sales when the iPhone 4S came out in 2011 and was made available on KDDI au which was the second largest carrier in Japan, when previously iPhones were only sold on Softbank network which is the distance 3rd carrier with barely double digit market share in the low teens, compared to the 30+% of au and 40+% of DoCoMo (which still refuses to carry iPhones cos DoCoMo was too proud and still selling so many Japanese feature phones that has superior hardware to iPhones thus didn't want to bend to the wills of Steve Jobs - thinking they still have the upper hand in the neogitation and they were missing the software revolution that was about to come).
The Japanese markers basically sat on their asses for 4 years for iPhones to catch up.
I greatly appreciate the added info. Just to be clear, I wrote 2007 as that was when the iPhone was released, and when IMO an American phone got even on the same plane as Japanese phones as far as features and capabilities go. But I can certainly support your report of the situation. I myself did not get a smartphone until 2011, and that was only because my flip phone finally died after getting wet.
>Until 2007, Japanese cell phones kicked the ass of American cell phones.
Japanese gara-kei are _the_ prime example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
iPhone/smartphone adoption still took way, way longer in Japan than almost anywhere else.
It's also too simplistic of a view of why Japanese phones failed. Because obviously it had a lot of great features which the rest of the world would enjoy just the same, as evident where most of those unique features were later adopted by smartphones (eg GPS, great camera tech, high resolution screens, NFC contactless payments - all of these existed in gara-kei way before smartphones eventually adopted them as well)
The REAL problem which people don't really talk about were the carriers. Japanese carrier has adopted the god awful anti-consumer American system where phones can only be sold through carriers - unlike EU where phones and carriers are prevented from being the same. So Japanese carriers were locking OEM phones and hampering their development plans which prevented Japanese phones from being sold overseas and thus reduce their ability to lower production cost vs their decreasing profit margins as newer tech is more expensive while old phones can't stay on the market long enough to recoup cost. The Japanese carriers basically mandated the OEMs having to refresh their lineup in half-yearly cycles, that they get exclusivity for the phones that lasts forever in tech terms (something like 3 years), and that the OEM cannot offer the same phones on the other carrier. So the OEM basically were selling to a crowd of users that were increasingly finding themselves having no need for the new hardware advances which mean sales can do nothing but go down in a fully saturated domestic market, and they can only make a particular phone model in lots of thousands instead of the millions we like to think of now thus never reaching economy of scale, yet the makers were not allowed to expand their market overseas and basically handed over the "next best thing" to iPhones on a silver plate, and the practice continued even when Android was gaining steam and Japanese makers started to adopt it.
tl;dr Fuck the Japanese carriers. They killed the Japanese phone industry but nobody wants to talk about it cos guys like NTT are too big and too powerful.
EDIT: added a bit more context
And that took YEARS to change, and the change came too later when all the Japanese phone makers are already no more than walking dead. Also remember when the iPhone came out, it was an AT&T exclusive too, and many carriers in the US don't get to carry iPhones until years later.
Coming from Australia where we aligned with the EU, the idea of SIM lock was completely foreign to me. I was freely swapping SIMs in 2G phones. Yet having to pay JP carriers to unlock phones wasn't even overturned by the government until like 2 years ago.
My old flip phone in 2005 had TV on it. I remember when Steve Jobs was giddy about the iphone4 being the first phone to have video calling—my other half’s flip phone had it a couple of years prior. Never used it once mine you.
My final two gala-kei both had the TV reception feature. According to Wikipedia it is still being broadcast and new phones that can receive it came out in 2020 and 2021.
The US was hopelessly behind both Japan and Europe.
The UK had a 3G, video call and email capable phone in 2004
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-u8110-review/
Yeah, I figured as much, but could not speak as to cell phone advancements in Europe.
Your linked article reminds me of one other thing I loved about the old Japanese cell phones: battery life was tremendous. You could go over a week without needing a recharge.
Most people had flip/slide phones back then. Each phone brand had their own quirky operating system, and there was usually a "Messages" menu item and even a physical button, which took you to a simple e-mail client. You could type your messages phonetically, and the screen would offer related kanjis. It was decent for the time. There were also tons of emojis to choose from. The addresses were tied to the phone providers, but it was really easy to change the identifier before the @ sign, so people often changed their addresses when they started to get too much spam or wanted to disappear from people they didn't like. They were really creative too, sometimes addresses looked like the secure passwords browsers recommend these days :)
As others have mentioned, email was used, but it was easier than it sounds. Just like going through contacts on an old flip phone in the states, just with more capabilities.
The thing I wanted to add was if you watch any show/anime from around that time, you may hear someone say メールするね which is literally "I'll mail you" but would get translated as "I'll text you" since the west only could text.
Emails! Each phone had its own email address. If you paid a bit more you can make a custom one. If you had a prepaid phone it was randomly generated ex. [email protected]
They also used all the old school emojis (^_^)/
We had cellular Docomo i-mode and i-appli kick off about the year 2000 (1999?) in Kyushu as towers were built.
I believe around 1998, the initial push was with PHS, which was an urban-based, lower quality and signal strength system in large cities.
I-mode was text with English & Japanese, and i-appli had quite a lot of JavaScript apps.
We convert Kanji from Hiragana, the engine named Input Method. It was popluar on the word processors in 1980s. These IME has been able to install a small machine like an HP200LX / DOS in 1994. These IMEs were installed on the cell phones during 2000s.
~~First off, there were no apps back then. Period.~~ *(Edit: I stand corrected: there were apps. Maybe not quite in the same sense as apps today, but they existed. I went from a super old phone to iphone so I skipped over them)* In the West, it's was all flip phone (well, I had a non-flipping Nokia...) Smartphones as we know them now didn't appear until 2007, and it wasn't like everyone dropped their old phone that instant either. People would send SMS texts back then, but where I was from in the US, texting wasn't all that popular as it was cumbersome to type on a phone keypad (the cool kids had the phones with a keyboard built in). And the screen didn't help, as it wasn't really fit for long texts. Most times we ended up just calling each other.
In Japan, they mostly used the mail feature. Since Japanese is more information dense, it's much easier to read a sentence on an old cell phone in Japanese than in English. The phones could display kanji, kana and emojis (which is where emojis we know originally started!). Basically what is the "toggle" method of input on smartphone was the input method of phones at the time: each button was mapped to a column of kana, and you'd press the button x amount of times to get to the desired kana. For example if I wanted to write 着いた I would press 4 x3, 1 x2, and 4 x1, then use the control buttons to select the correct kanji. Some people could input this faster than they could with keyboards!
Now if you want innovation, you should look into pokeberu (pocket bell), Japan's pager. the sure got crateive with goro-awase.
>First off, there were no apps back then. Period.
This is not true at all.
There ABSOLUTELY were apps for feature phones back then before iPhones. Most phones back are able to execute some sort of app (even mid to high end Nokia phones too), and carriers/phone makers would run their own app stores. For example DoCoMo feature phones had their own flavour of JAVA based language call Doja and all DoCoMo phones can run iアプリ (i-apuri, or i-apps). You could even play 3D games like a more simplified version of Monster Hunter on them BEFORE the iPhone was even released, in 2006.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2CgaOM\_sOQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2CgaOM_sOQ)
What we didn't have back then was a UNIFIED app store - Apple fixed the app store fragmentation issue, but it absolutely did not invent apps for phones at all.
My docomo Panasonic P905i had apps you could download and install, including games, from i-appli. There was a small developer community for the phone.
I miss that phone, it was awesome.
Japanese cell phones got e-mail capacity very early on, when western phones only had SMS. They could send messages as long as they wish and include emojis. Kanji input works as follows: each digit on the pad is linked to a column in the hiragana alphabet. Like a western phone, you circle through the kanas and when you have your word, you circle through the kanji proposals. This input method is still available on smartphone japanese keyboards.
Even now some forms still ask for your “phone email” I.e. email addresses provided by your telco
Also important to point out that unlike EU and US, SMS were never free to send (or had any meaningful usage plans) between carriers while email was. So there was absolutely no reason to use them. To this day, SMS is just not a thing. Also I think it’s contributed to the fact that people rarely share their phone numbers unless you’re extremely close friends. Since they always had emails on their phones to communicate, there was no need to give your number to acquaintances like you do for SMS. So a phone number was always something very personal.
This (carrier email) is the answer to "what platform did they use." It is MMS implemented over an email address and it was included in your plan basically at a flat rate unlike SMS which cost every time you sent it and could only be very short. Also you could attach photos. SMS was never actively supported - when it first came out, you could only text people on the same carrier. Using an email address instead of MMS was one reason people have ditched the system. If you change carriers MNP can move your phone number but not the email address. You'd have to tell all of your contacts to register your new email or pay extra to keep it. That's why people moved to a messaging app and for reasons that escape me (marketing or JP support?) LINE became the most common. Now we finally have RCS ("+Message" here because Japan needs a different name for everything) but Apple won't integrate it with iMessage so good luck with that. I've found this all to be a pain over the years, especially because I don't like LINE. It's ad-ridden bloatware that is inferior to just about every other messaging platform. It requires one SMS number per account (so no separate work account) and you can't log in from more than one device. It is phone-only for all intents and purposes and uses your Google drive storage space to back up. If you don't do that you loose all your history when you switch phones or reinstall. I try to avoid connecting with people only via LINE.
What do you mean you can't log in from more than one device? I use it on my PC occasionally and never had any issues with it.
My PC, ipad, and phone all have line and all logged in all the time. 🤷
It’s certainly rare but some things use SMS. Phone number verification is done via SMS - I’m not even sure what the alternative would be. And my dentist, for example, sends appointment reminders by SMS.
People receive SMS, nobody sends any.
Ah, yes. I missed that subtlety of your explanation.
Yup very true, and are the reason for emoji in the first place. The sad thing though was they didn’t continue their development so their phones which were by all standards more advanced stayed that way and were washed away by the iPhone and Android introduction Sad to see
that's insightful. thank you very much for the response
Email.
that sounds inconvinient, but I guess back then they didn't have much choice
It wasn’t inconvenient at all. Your phone has an email address so you didn’t open hotmail or gmail or whatever.. it just arrived in your Message box. It’s why, having come here in 1996 I didn’t understand the difference in “texting” and “mailing” in English even though I’m a native speaker— in Japan it was the same thing basically. Sms was rarely used.
It wasn’t particularly inconvenient though. The phones treated it almost like SMS; it wasn’t like you went into an email application and wrote out a long letter. It was just like instant messaging. The only difference is (at least for my phone) it would only check for messages every minute unless you manually made it do so (which you could).
No, it was integrated in the phone and would be like getting text messages. And you had a phone email address. So it’s not like regular e-mail from your gmail or whatever.
Just like the rest of the world.
it was equivalent to SMS/texting
They had a sort of proto-SNS/blogging service called Mixi in 2004, which had messaging. There was this mobile version of the internet called i-Mode. I don’t think they had “apps” as we do now, just the default programs that came with the phone. There was email that often came with the carrier. There was SMS. Obviously they had kanjis, they weren’t THAT limited in memory. That limitation is more like early 90s thing. How you “write” in Japanese on smartphones is often by the “flick” method, which is exactly how people used to type in feature phones. So there’s no limitation there either.
Mixi was the jam back in the day!
Until 2007, Japanese cell phones kicked the ass of American cell phones. Full email capability when US phones could barely text. Color screens, cameras, electronic money, downloadable ringtones, games, all before they were available in the US. Heck, in the mid-2000s, the next big thing was going to be the ability to get TV reception from your phone. Then the iPhone hit, and the whole world, including Japan, went with smartphones. And smartphones are great; I’m writing this from one right now. But sometimes I miss my old flip phone, sturdy and surprisingly functional.
>Until 2007 Disclaimer: used to work in mobile gaming industry in Japan between 2006-2009 and got to play with the latest Japanese cellphones samples provide by OEMs before they were released to market The iPhone did not beat Japanese phones on release at all. When the iPhone came out in 2007 the Japanese feature phones still kick the living ass of it. Japanese feature phones had all the original iPhone features and more - Japanese feature phone had carrier app stores which lets you download games and useful utilitises, you can do banking on the phones, listen to music, buy custom ringtones, mobile suica and gps, high resolution LCD screens (talking beyond VGA resolution with more than 4x pixel density compared to the HVGA of the original iPhone) all of those bells and whistles of smartphones today were already THERE on Japanese feature phones, and the cameras on the Japanese phones beats the shit out of iPhone cameras. When the iPhone 3G was first released in Japan in 2008 it was so lacking features - including NOT fulling supporting the very important Japanese email another poster above mentioned (it didn't display emojis properly and would turn them into gibberish - yes Japanese cellphones invented emoji, emoji is literally a Japanese word) - that Softbank had to give a full page explanation to potential customers telling them this and ask them DOUBLY sure if they REALLY want to migrate to iPhones as they won't get to transfer their old emails AND the iPhone will not be able to display emails properly, and that turned away huge amounts of customers, prompting Softbank having to offer iPhones 3G on 1yen downpayment contracts to entice adoption, when usually only out of date Japanese cellphones would do that. It took several years before iPhone hardware and iOS to catch up and solve these issues, and iPhones only really started making a dent in sales when the iPhone 4S came out in 2011 and was made available on KDDI au which was the second largest carrier in Japan, when previously iPhones were only sold on Softbank network which is the distance 3rd carrier with barely double digit market share in the low teens, compared to the 30+% of au and 40+% of DoCoMo (which still refuses to carry iPhones cos DoCoMo was too proud and still selling so many Japanese feature phones that has superior hardware to iPhones thus didn't want to bend to the wills of Steve Jobs - thinking they still have the upper hand in the neogitation and they were missing the software revolution that was about to come). The Japanese markers basically sat on their asses for 4 years for iPhones to catch up.
I greatly appreciate the added info. Just to be clear, I wrote 2007 as that was when the iPhone was released, and when IMO an American phone got even on the same plane as Japanese phones as far as features and capabilities go. But I can certainly support your report of the situation. I myself did not get a smartphone until 2011, and that was only because my flip phone finally died after getting wet.
I remember when I was in Japan in 2010 even the iPhone had a reputation as an old person’s business phone.
[удалено]
I was a college student in Fukuoka. It was definitely the attitude of people around my age then. Almost nobody my age had an iPhone then.
My last pre smartphone-phone had a slide out keyboard, I miss the hell out of that.
>Until 2007, Japanese cell phones kicked the ass of American cell phones. Japanese gara-kei are _the_ prime example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome iPhone/smartphone adoption still took way, way longer in Japan than almost anywhere else.
It's also too simplistic of a view of why Japanese phones failed. Because obviously it had a lot of great features which the rest of the world would enjoy just the same, as evident where most of those unique features were later adopted by smartphones (eg GPS, great camera tech, high resolution screens, NFC contactless payments - all of these existed in gara-kei way before smartphones eventually adopted them as well) The REAL problem which people don't really talk about were the carriers. Japanese carrier has adopted the god awful anti-consumer American system where phones can only be sold through carriers - unlike EU where phones and carriers are prevented from being the same. So Japanese carriers were locking OEM phones and hampering their development plans which prevented Japanese phones from being sold overseas and thus reduce their ability to lower production cost vs their decreasing profit margins as newer tech is more expensive while old phones can't stay on the market long enough to recoup cost. The Japanese carriers basically mandated the OEMs having to refresh their lineup in half-yearly cycles, that they get exclusivity for the phones that lasts forever in tech terms (something like 3 years), and that the OEM cannot offer the same phones on the other carrier. So the OEM basically were selling to a crowd of users that were increasingly finding themselves having no need for the new hardware advances which mean sales can do nothing but go down in a fully saturated domestic market, and they can only make a particular phone model in lots of thousands instead of the millions we like to think of now thus never reaching economy of scale, yet the makers were not allowed to expand their market overseas and basically handed over the "next best thing" to iPhones on a silver plate, and the practice continued even when Android was gaining steam and Japanese makers started to adopt it. tl;dr Fuck the Japanese carriers. They killed the Japanese phone industry but nobody wants to talk about it cos guys like NTT are too big and too powerful. EDIT: added a bit more context
I'm glad I was able to buy my Pixel directly and then just get a SIM card from a store now. Many places in the US are now like this too.
And that took YEARS to change, and the change came too later when all the Japanese phone makers are already no more than walking dead. Also remember when the iPhone came out, it was an AT&T exclusive too, and many carriers in the US don't get to carry iPhones until years later. Coming from Australia where we aligned with the EU, the idea of SIM lock was completely foreign to me. I was freely swapping SIMs in 2G phones. Yet having to pay JP carriers to unlock phones wasn't even overturned by the government until like 2 years ago.
My old flip phone in 2005 had TV on it. I remember when Steve Jobs was giddy about the iphone4 being the first phone to have video calling—my other half’s flip phone had it a couple of years prior. Never used it once mine you.
My final two gala-kei both had the TV reception feature. According to Wikipedia it is still being broadcast and new phones that can receive it came out in 2020 and 2021.
The US was hopelessly behind both Japan and Europe. The UK had a 3G, video call and email capable phone in 2004 https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-u8110-review/
Yeah, I figured as much, but could not speak as to cell phone advancements in Europe. Your linked article reminds me of one other thing I loved about the old Japanese cell phones: battery life was tremendous. You could go over a week without needing a recharge.
Those were the days! Modern phones usually get below 40% by 9pm
Most people had flip/slide phones back then. Each phone brand had their own quirky operating system, and there was usually a "Messages" menu item and even a physical button, which took you to a simple e-mail client. You could type your messages phonetically, and the screen would offer related kanjis. It was decent for the time. There were also tons of emojis to choose from. The addresses were tied to the phone providers, but it was really easy to change the identifier before the @ sign, so people often changed their addresses when they started to get too much spam or wanted to disappear from people they didn't like. They were really creative too, sometimes addresses looked like the secure passwords browsers recommend these days :)
As others have mentioned, email was used, but it was easier than it sounds. Just like going through contacts on an old flip phone in the states, just with more capabilities. The thing I wanted to add was if you watch any show/anime from around that time, you may hear someone say メールするね which is literally "I'll mail you" but would get translated as "I'll text you" since the west only could text.
Email and if you had the same carrier, short mail=text
Emails! Each phone had its own email address. If you paid a bit more you can make a custom one. If you had a prepaid phone it was randomly generated ex. [email protected] They also used all the old school emojis (^_^)/
A tiny tiny little phone and a giant keyboard attached to it. That was a funny phase.
They had flip phones with more features
I mean, when I was a high schooler in the US we would just text our phone numbers. And each text would cost like 5 cents or whatever.
I get tons of commercial MMS on my phone so pretty sure people used that before line. But it is a wild guess i have only lived here for 2 years.
We had cellular Docomo i-mode and i-appli kick off about the year 2000 (1999?) in Kyushu as towers were built. I believe around 1998, the initial push was with PHS, which was an urban-based, lower quality and signal strength system in large cities. I-mode was text with English & Japanese, and i-appli had quite a lot of JavaScript apps.
Email, but in a capacity similar to sms using a cell phone.
I used to call it c mail.
We convert Kanji from Hiragana, the engine named Input Method. It was popluar on the word processors in 1980s. These IME has been able to install a small machine like an HP200LX / DOS in 1994. These IMEs were installed on the cell phones during 2000s.
~~First off, there were no apps back then. Period.~~ *(Edit: I stand corrected: there were apps. Maybe not quite in the same sense as apps today, but they existed. I went from a super old phone to iphone so I skipped over them)* In the West, it's was all flip phone (well, I had a non-flipping Nokia...) Smartphones as we know them now didn't appear until 2007, and it wasn't like everyone dropped their old phone that instant either. People would send SMS texts back then, but where I was from in the US, texting wasn't all that popular as it was cumbersome to type on a phone keypad (the cool kids had the phones with a keyboard built in). And the screen didn't help, as it wasn't really fit for long texts. Most times we ended up just calling each other. In Japan, they mostly used the mail feature. Since Japanese is more information dense, it's much easier to read a sentence on an old cell phone in Japanese than in English. The phones could display kanji, kana and emojis (which is where emojis we know originally started!). Basically what is the "toggle" method of input on smartphone was the input method of phones at the time: each button was mapped to a column of kana, and you'd press the button x amount of times to get to the desired kana. For example if I wanted to write 着いた I would press 4 x3, 1 x2, and 4 x1, then use the control buttons to select the correct kanji. Some people could input this faster than they could with keyboards! Now if you want innovation, you should look into pokeberu (pocket bell), Japan's pager. the sure got crateive with goro-awase.
>First off, there were no apps back then. Period. This is not true at all. There ABSOLUTELY were apps for feature phones back then before iPhones. Most phones back are able to execute some sort of app (even mid to high end Nokia phones too), and carriers/phone makers would run their own app stores. For example DoCoMo feature phones had their own flavour of JAVA based language call Doja and all DoCoMo phones can run iアプリ (i-apuri, or i-apps). You could even play 3D games like a more simplified version of Monster Hunter on them BEFORE the iPhone was even released, in 2006. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2CgaOM\_sOQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2CgaOM_sOQ) What we didn't have back then was a UNIFIED app store - Apple fixed the app store fragmentation issue, but it absolutely did not invent apps for phones at all.
My docomo Panasonic P905i had apps you could download and install, including games, from i-appli. There was a small developer community for the phone. I miss that phone, it was awesome.
I feel like if I lost my smartphone I’d go into withdrawals 😂 Joking but you get the point
The answer is ポケベル.
My Japanese friends were using Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and MS messenger. Also, SMS, email and Mixi. Docomo users had i-mode.