Japan dumps the PC, gets texting

Interesting story in the Sydney Morning Herald (brought to our attention by the inestimable Digital World Tokyo) about Japan's shift from the PC to the mobile phone. The number of Japanese 20 year olds with internet connected PCs has dropped from 23.6% to 11.9%. From a European/British perspective the notion of only 1 in 10 of such a high spending market having PCs is very alien.

Some Japanese universities report a sizeable chunk of their students graduate without using a computer.

The reasons are many: the computer form factor - qwerty keyboard and all - just doesn't translate well to a country whose language can be written in four different character sets, sometimes all in the same sentence.

By contrast the mobile web is booming: sites like Mixi (Japan's MySpace) and Yahoo all place mobile as at least as important as Web. The keitei takes the place as a communications device that the PC has in the UK.