The last MAX 2007 conference is finished and it's been an amazing tour de force around the world. First Chicago, then Barcelona and now Tokyo. It's incredible to see presentations by designers and developers in each region and the ideas that they're sharing. There's definitely a wide range of Flash Lite that's being created and sold here in Japan, some of it is only applicable for the market here while others could easily be re-purposed in other countries.

Mobile is alive and doing very well here in Japan. Besides 3G being everywhere (which is nice), 85% of all handsets that are shipping in Japan are Flash enabled, meaning they have some version of Flash Lite pre-installed. That number will increase over time.

There were five mobile related sessions here in Tokyo on Thursday and even though four of them were presented in Japanese the information presented was so good that I was able to follow along and get a good idea of what was being shown. Some of the highlights included presentations from CELL mobile, DeNA and Neuromagic. I'm trying to get some of their content to share in another post to help inspire others of the types of experiences they're creating.

For my presentation I showed examples of Flash Lite content from developers around the world as well as numerous handsets that use Flash Lite for the UI. Thanks to all of the developers who allowed me to show their work to the attendees - they really liked it. There's a lot of innovative uses of Flash Lite for UI that I'm just recently learning about and will be posting some video clips shortly. If you're interested you can download my MAX 2007 Japan presentation but be warned it's in Japanese.

Now off to some sightseeing and eating some of the best fresh fish in the world.

KDDI in Japan has announced their upcoming autumn & winter 2007 collection of devices and all of them have Flash Lite 2.0 pre-installed for supporting downloadable content and personalization. Besides their new handsets having Flash Lite pre-installed, the interactive product experience on their web sites looks like it's using Papervision 3D and Flash 9- pretty cool.

The new handsets include several color variations of each of the following models:

• Infobar 2
• W56T
• W55T
• W54S
• W54SA
• W53H
• W53K

Some of these devices may be using Flash Lite for the UI but I'm not sure - it's something I trying to get more information on and will share once I find out.

There's a handy device table on their site which provides more details about all of their devices including Flash Lite support. You'll notice there's a column that says "Flash Lite" and one of four icons for each handset:

• Black filled circle = Flash Lite 2.0 (includes Chaku-flash support)
• Circle with dot inside = Flash Lite 1.1 (Chaku-Flash support)
• Empty circle = Flash Lite 1.1 (no Chaku-Flash support)
• Dash ('-') = no Flash Lite support
  

While I'm here in Tokyo I'm going to try to see if I can take a look at these devices and to get some ideas of the types of Flash Lite content that local developers are creating.

For the past week I've been in Tokyo for several customer meetings and now have some time to catch up on things before I fly back to San Francisco. This was my second time to Tokyo and I really enjoy the people, food and culture. Not to mention it's one of the cleanest cities I've been to.

If you've been to Tokyo then you know how it feels like you've time traveled to the future, where people travel by an integrated public transportation system that accepts payments by cash, IC pass and mobile phones. Shiny electronic gadgets with blinking lights give a sense of what consumers can expect to purchase in the US 9-12 months from now.

The handsets (or terminals as they're called here) are very, very cool. VGA screens that pivot 90 degrees, 5MP cameras, integrated IC credit (Felica), and kick-ass form factors and colors. I'll be posting more interesting notes next week as well as my review of the LG Prada phone after 2 weeks of using it.

Today Adobe announced that NTT DoCoMo’s i-channel news and information service, powered by Adobe FlashCast technology, has surpassed 10 Million subscribers in Japan. NTT DoCoMo hit this important milestone just 18 months after the launch. The rapidly expanding data service is delivered through 25 channels to almost 20 percent of all NTT DoCoMo customers.

You can read more about in the press release.

This is really great news and shows how the user experience can play such a significant impact for consumer discoverability of data services.

John Nack pinged me today with a link to an article from Japan (English version or Japanese version) about artists who are designing visually stunning wallpapers, screensavers and menus using Flash Lite. It's not that often that these types of imagery for mobile phones is discussed and seen outside Japan and it's great that Sakaguchi-san took the time to share the work of some of the top artists there. Japan has such an expressive and fun culture, you can see creativity all around you from fashion, to entertainment to their mobile phones.

With the upcoming integrated designer features of Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Device Central there will be even more opportunities for designers to easily preview their designs within the aspects of specific devices by designing for specific screen sizes.

Here's some more good news for today:

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that more than two million mobile phone subscribers have signed up for NTT DoCoMo's i-channel news and information delivery service since it was launched in Japan last September. i-channel is powered by Macromedia FlashCast technology from Adobe, a client-server solution that effectively delivers rich data experiences to mobile devices."

2 million+ subscribers in about 7 months for a new mobile data service is incredible and it's an indication of the ease of discoverability of the i-channel service by consumers in Japan.