Freyburg

Ok, let’s get this out of the way….it ain’t worth it to get up at 3 a.m. and stagger to a lineup for a Steve Jobs keynote. But that’s just what I did this morning, since I’d never been to one of Apple’s signature shindigs before. My verdict on the new gear Apple trotted out today? Meh. Canada doesn’t have movies for purchase on the iTunes store, let alone rentals, and we also don’t have iPhones. The Macbook Air is a nice bit of engineering, but it’s nothing I pine for.

Still, getting to see a live “Macbreak Weekly” was cool, as was finally meeting Merlin Mann and Andy Inhatko. Tonight there’s a party for attendees featuring non other thanDevo, and there’s a lot of informative podcast creation sessions over the next couple of days.

Although it hasn’t been widely reported in Western media, the fact that novels for mobile phones outsold print books in Japan in the past year did briefly hit the news this past summer… the fact that people in Japan regularly read books on their cell phones is a story in itself though.

After Wired (still the usual outlet for tech stories to break into the mainstream) wrote it up early in 2007, there was a similar story a few months later in the Economist, and finally just a month or two ago, The Wall Street Journal did a small piece on it. However, surely the fact that the country showing us where mobile technology is headed shunning print books for e-books deserves a bit more media attention.

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Yahoo! (what, they’re still around?) just published a story on how now Japanese consumers in general are avoiding buying personal computers at all. There was a news article a couple years back about how the move to using mobile phones for online activity in Japan meant that an increasing number of young adults entering the workplace had never even touched a computer, so the Yahoo! story isn’t very surprising.

With Internet connected game consoles, mobile phones with advanced surfing and email capability, and TVs that can download movies (legally) directly from the net, the trend shows no sign of slowing, unless the PC makers can come up with something new to woo the masses. Knowing Japan, that just may happen, though, and when it does it’ll likely be something pretty crazy…