As I mentioned in 10min Tokyo(part 2) cell phones are the hot consumer electronics item in Tokyo. It is so much the case that even mentioning that it is as widespread as it is, is very much akin to saying Americans like bottled water. They are everywhere, they are seemingly used more the family television & they make 90% of American cell phones look like they were made by Playskool. The last 10% is pretty much made up of the iPhone and Samsung.

They do more, hold more, light up more, are customizable more and run circles around their American counterparts. Case is point is their ability to interpret 2D Barcode (also know as QR codes).

2D Barcode, I can hear you now going who cares if they can interpret them and what does that even mean? The short answer is:

1. Interpreting 2D Barcodes means they can take their cell phone and take a picture of a 2D Barcode anywhere they might come across one ( and this is everywhere in Tokyo, posters, TV commercials, on the train, on the bus, in a magazine, business cards & yes even fresh produce ) and the Barcode holds the website address (or any data some even contain small video clips) for whatever someone is promoting so that once you take a photo of it the cell phone recognizes it, reads it & loads the website. Until you have seen this in action it can be hard to understand.

2. Even though I think the skill is borderline pointless in America where most everyone surfs on a tower or laptop and our URLs are tailor made to be as short as humanly possible it is very odd to see a technology we either don’t have or haven’t passed up and forgotten. Walking around and slowly realizing and having to figure out the odd reason there are all these 2D Barcodes everywhere is society used by everyone from the most advanced programmer to the simplest grandmother only to realize it is something you have never heard off is both very fun and slightly off putting.

With the ability as I mentioned above to encode data for small video files (or large ones if you overlay a second color image and double the storage, if anyone develops that Patent tomorrow this is prior art and I want some credit ) this might catch on in the States but doubtful since we still do not make use of texting & cellphones the way other nations do.