Why Japan Said Goodbye To Traditional Flip Phones
Flip phones endured in Japan longer than the US, but the trend is shifting.
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Chances are you haven't seen a flip phone in the wild for years. The days of the old Motorola RAZR and similar clamshells are long gone. But in Japan, its esoteric tech ecosystem kept them in circulation for decades.
The gara-kei, short for Galapagos keitai, are Japan's curious feature phones with physical keyboards that refused to die in an era of big-screened smartphones. "Galapagos" refers to the isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, and keitai stands for "portable." For a time, Japanese mobile carriers sold enough of these basic handsets to inspire hybrid garaho phones from brands like Kyocera that paired clamshells with Android and 4G connectivity.
But consumer habits are changing. A Docomo surveyin Japan found that smartphones accounted for 90 percent of mobile phone owners in 2021 and 98 percent...
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