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When it comes to consumer electronics, the Japanese are always the first to get the good stuff. They are routinely treated to the newest video-game consoles months before they hit American shores. Most digital MP3 players here are larger than a deck of cards, while Japan's newest arrival, a digital audio player from Panasonic, is easily mistaken for a wristwatch. And cell phones, the biggest killer app of all? Same deal. But it's not just the sleeker, slimmer handsets everybody carries over there. It's what the Japanese — particularly the under-25 crowd — have been doing with their mobiles that's worth watching. Because it just might yield a few clues about where our own so-called wireless revolution is — or should be — headed.

Japan's leading cell-phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, is by far the world's most successful purveyor of the wireless Internet, with nearly 11 million subscribers to its "i-mode" service. The main attractions: entertainment and socializing. A typical i-mode user is a young woman who enjoys e-mailing friends, consulting shopping and restaurant guides, dressing up her cell phone's screen by downloading color images of animated characters or celebrities (Brad Pitt is a current fave) or changing its ring to resemble a hit pop song. She might head to a dating site to search for a special someone — and, if she gets lucky, visit another site to reserve a room at a hotel.

Plenty of young men have also found uses for i-mode. Shinichiro Tanaka, a 20-year-old college student living in Tokyo, uses his i-mode N209i to read e-mail off a PC at his parents' home in Nagasaki. His screen displays a picture of his favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Junya Sakamoto, 21, can't wait to get a new Game Boy adapter from Nintendo so he can connect the device to his cell phone and download Pokémon characters.

U.S. cell-phone carriers, which hope to stimulate interest in their own wireless Net services, emphasize more practical features: you can check news, weather, stock quotes or the price of books at Amazon.com. Consumers are beginning to warm up to the idea, but subscriber totals aren't much above 1 million. Perhaps it's not fair to compare the two markets. In Japan, teens have been the wireless trendsetters for years; in the U.S., companies have sought to please mobile professionals. Wired connections to the Net are not nearly as cheap or ubiquitous in Japan as they are in the States, making the cell phone a more appealing Net appliance by default. Still, couldn't someone give us just a little Brad Pitt?

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PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME DIGITAL BY JOSEPH PLUCHINO
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME DIGITAL BY WILLIAM DUKE (inset)

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