Sony Ericsson: Sublime Japan Handset Design
This week, WWJ sits down with Sony Ericsson to look into the design process that animates Japan’s ubercool handset industry. We ask about product planning, design peculiarities of the Japanese market, development for overseas, and about new technologies – like removable memory and swivel cameras. Sony Ericsson is one of Japan’s top handset factories and their new-last-week 505i handset for DoCoMo is the only one with a 1.3-megapixel camera. If there’s something these folks don’t know about creating handsets, it’s not worth knowing.
Comments from Wireless Watch Japan Editor-in-Chief Daniel Scuka:
This week, we present one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done for WWJ – an in-depth discussion with Soichi Kawachi from Sony Ericsson on how handsets are created in Japan.
Like many of you, I’ve always been impressed with Japan’s handsets – they embody an ineffable degree of design care that is replicated in few other markets. In this, mobile terminals are not much different from many other Japanese electronic devices – they all seem to have been created with convenience, functionality, and customer delight in mind.
This modern technological design excellence is directly connected to the ancient Japanese sense of aesthetics. It’s not much of a philosophical jump to go from a perfect, single ikebana flower or a single character created by the perfect number of brush strokes to a perfect, ultra-high-tech mobile handset.
“We have to set up the concept of the product,” says Kawachi, and I believe him – before any IC chip is ever pressed or before any handset shell is chiseled, a whole bunch of people spend a whole lot of time thinking about how the end-user will actually employ the phone.
In the same way that there’s nothing like a cold Pilsner in Prague, fresh sushi at Tsukiji, lobster baked on a Maine beach, or a chilled glass of Riesling at a Rhine-side winestube, nothing approaches having a made-in-Japan handset in Shibuya.
Sure, the Korean handsets have recently started to rival the Japanese, and Nokia still creates mobile phones that embody a unique Euro chic, but I’ll choose Japan’s pocket rockets any day – they’re slick, highly functional, and perform exactly as their makers say they will. And they fit with the usage patterns here – how real Japanese use the devices, whether commuting each day from Kawasaki to Tokyo or hanging out at a tea house in Kyoto.
Significantly, I think this devotion to completely understanding the end-user is one major if little-recited reason why Japanese makers haven’t been as successful outside Japan – their designers simply don’t know how folks elsewhere use mobile devices and so they are hesitant to commit whole-heartedly to those markets.
Granted, this is changing, and makers here are trying their hardest to create products for overseas (they have to, to survive), but when they do, the handsets won’t “fit” the end-users like they do here in Japan.
In the same way that there’s nothing like a cold Pilsner in Prague, fresh sushi at Tsukiji, lobster baked on a Maine beach, or a chilled glass of Riesling at a Rhine-side winestube, nothing approaches having a made-in-Japan handset in Shibuya.