”Woof!” It might sound like a meaningless bark but, in fact, the dog is saying ”Ya ne! Soba ni konai de! [Hey! Don’t come near me!]”. And while a European might make the mistake of approaching the diffident hound, Japanese dog owners would know to steer clear. Why? Because their phones would translate for them.
Bowlingual, a mobile application available to Vodafone subscribers in Japan, has a repertoire of about 200 dog phrases. It’s just one of the many strange, but innovative, mobile products available in the Far East — and another reminder of how far ahead the Japanese are in non-voice applications.
Of course, they did have a head start. NTT DoCoMo’s data service i-mode was launched in February 1999 and now has more than 40-million subscribers. Meanwhile, Vodafone KK, the British company’s Japanese subsidiary, has 12,8-million Live! customers. Compare that with the 4,5-milion Live! users across 15 countries in Europe.
These huge user-bases have given developers free rein to think laterally and create products that capitalise on the personal, ubiquitous nature of the phone. Hence Inu Tomo, a virtual dog that sniffs out other virtual dogs (via a local area network link) and prompts an introduction to its ”real life” owner. Or Panasonic’s virtual pet, which demands a banana and is only satisfied when its owner takes a photo of something yellow. Or how about NEC’s Phone Battler, a game that ascribes fighting properties to faces captured by the camera phone and pits them against each other.
The latter is a good illustration of the way handset manufacturers use games to show off the features of their devices. In Japan the functions of phones are specified to ensure that new models come on to the market at the same time.
This means that, for manufacturers, bundled content is the best way to differentiate their products. The Fujitsu 505 has a fingerprint reader. And, you’ve guessed it, it can be used to pet your virtual dog.
Phone standardisation also makes life easier for developers. With the networks dictating basic phone specs, they can code games they know will run across virtually all devices. On i-mode, for example, phones run a cut-down version of the mobile games engine Java called DoJa, which standardises important factors such as input processing and the user interface.
It’s not the same in the United Kingdom, to the frustration of the country’s domestic game makers. With Nokia, Motorola, Siemens et al pursuing disparate strategies, developers find themselves tweaking the same game dozens of times. And, usually, the exciting angles attacked by the Japanese are out of reach, too.
Matt Spall, director of UK studio Morpheme, says: ”I’d love to put a phone-camera element into one of our games. But at the moment, it’s not possible because of the way Java works on most European handsets. That’s why, if you want your game to be widely available, you have to go for the common denominator.”
Morpheme is trying, at least. Its Fartbox application (like a phone-based whoopee cushion) is a laudably tasteless departure from the retro games and cut-down PlayStation fayre that have established mobile gaming without defining it. If it could just create a virtual Fartbox pet, you’d be able to blame the dog. — Â