Given the time period mentioned in the quora post, yes the Japanese (at least in Tokyo) had more advanced phones than we readily had access to here in the US until 2007. However, I was in Japan a little over a year ago, and I can tell you affirmatively that the common phones people were using were less-advanced than my iPhone 3G at the time.<p>The typical phone was a long skinny thing with a tiny elongated screen and dozens of impossibly tiny buttons crammed together to make something like a keyboard. They had cameras of inferior quality, inferior internet access, etc. I'll grant that some of their phones had things like NFC, but that's the exception that proves the rule. And my, was my little touchscreen phone popular with the ladies.<p>Its hard to disagree that Apple alone has completely shaped what it means to be a smartphone in the last 4 years. Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone 7 did not exist before iOS came out. Android <i>has</i> become the marginal market leader in the last 6 months or so in terms of overall phones sold, but that's a fragmented OS market now. The WebOS phones failed, and WP7(a pretty cool OS, imho) is having trouble getting traction. Right now, biggest and most unified smart phone market is simply iOS.<p>But to put everything into perspective, the model described by in the QP is remarkably similar to Apple's model in many ways. About 10 years ago, DoCoMo said "these are the specs that you will support on your phones", and because DoCoMo had the marketshare of customers, that's what happened. In the US, you don't see a red Verizon logo on the iPhone, right? Apple controls the software and hardware, aka "the specs" of their phones. They have dictated what the carriers will support for things like Visual Voicemail.<p>The sad part is that DoCoMo seems to have been innovating for a while, which helped give Japan (Tokyo?) the cache of having the best phones in the world. However, that hasn't been true for a long time and now the most popular phones in Japan are iPhones.