[cbracken]

During the pre-smartphone days, at least, I found Japanese input to be much more efficient than English/French due to the need to input far fewer characters to say the same thing. The difference was signficant enough that if I was writing to another foreigner who spoke Japanese, we'd generally just write in Japanese.

I remember being disappointed at the original iPhone since it didn't include a fingerprint scanner, digital wallet/train pass, or video recording support, all of which were available on my Japanese flip-phone that had been released 3 years earlier at less than half the price.