Specifics of website development for Japanese mobile phones; testing?

Question

Is there any good advise on developing websites specifically for Japanese mobile phones? As I see it so far, the site basically has to be bare-bone HTML, mostly <p>s and <br>s and tiny, compressed postage stamp graphics if need be. There are also some UTF-8 codes for pre-defined graphics. Are there any other conventions one should be aware of?

Also, what are good ways to test mobile sites? I use Opera's "mobile view" simulator, but that only goes so far. There are some simulators provided by the mobile phone corps, but they're either horribly outdated, won't install or produce mojibake on my English-language test system (and I don't have the nerve to install another OS right now). An actual phone doesn't work during development as it's not on the intranet.

Answer 1

Nowadays, all JP phones feature full-browsers with CSS support (like the safari on iPhone).

Most users, however, access content through their provider's proprietary platform. For a site to work in JP (commercially, i mean), you will want to be listed on their "approved sites" directory.

There are three main platforms, one for each major provider:

• Imode for NTT DoCoMo subscribers (link to NTT dev guide here)
• Yahoo! Ketai for Softbank (ex Vodafone) subscribers (link to Softbank dev guide)
• EZweb for au KDDI subscribers (link to AU KDDI dev guide)

For having done several sites for JP mobile market (i work and live in JP), I would recommend testing with the dev kit offered by each provider. Your site will need to satisfy each provider's unique set of quality standards, and will be verified by a QA person at that company.

Also, by experience, I can tell you that NTT and Softbank standards are easy to pass, while AU will give you a hard time for the tinyest details. On my last project, I had to go in person at the AU KDDI center to test my site on every single phone since 2000 (they have a special room just for testing).

Oh, yeah, and I would also recommending adding asian language support on your PC. On XP, you can do that by going to Control Panel > Regional Language Options > Advanced. Set the "Language for non-Unicode programs" to Japanese, and tadaa! you can run japanese softwares.

Cheers !