[sbarre]

I was in Japan in 2008 and the cellphones there were from the future! I remember being awed seeing people watching TV on the subway on their phones..

There was a bunch of infrastructure and services provided by the actual phone company NTT DoCoMo (as opposed to generally over the Internet) that let people watch shows, play games, shop, etc.. all on their mobile devices. Stuff that we do now every day, but this was almost 20 years ago.

They also had phones built for this purpose, like ones that had rotating screens that went into landscape mode (imagine holding a "T"-shaped device) for watching TV..

So it certainly felt like they were ahead, but you're right, it was a very different approach with everything coming from the phone company itself, and one that wasn't set up to stay competitive or stay ahead..

[Sakos]

Other examples of this are the Satellaview for the SNES and the 64DD for the Nintendo 64, both of which were only launched in Japan. The Satellaview let you download games and the 64DD let you browse the internet. Apparently they'd also planned to have multiplayer online gaming for the 64DD, but that was never released.