Japanese don't buy European handsets: "Nokia denied that there was a sales problem but admitted that there was "user confusion" over Nokia's keyboard buttons since Nokia insists on using a different convention to other handsets in the Japanese market."

And hmm, look at the poorest handsets that we get over here: those with UIs from Japanese manufacturers (yes NEC, I'm looking at you) which just haven't adapted to the UK. I'm increasingly coming round to the view that UIs are much more culturally dependent than I'd realised, or that there is some sort of Asia/Europe/USA divide, which seems ridiculous to me intellectually but seems to be the case: American handset UI is awful but tolerated over there, European UI seems to be OK and transfer well across European territories, and Chinese/Japanese is terrifying to a poor old European (and vice versa).

Upcoming event alert: I'll be at Casuality Europe next February, talking about our experiences working for the largest casual game publisher in the UK: what we've done, how we've done it, what works and what doesn't.

Interesting point I'd not considered from Christopher Kobayashi, on the Keitai-L list: "Kind of spooky to think that there's web connections in the background
without the user pressing a link/button. Basically meaning that
they'll be charged without them knowing it.
If you're on a unlimited data plan this wouldn't matter much, but what
about the poor souls not on this plan. Bad people can make things
expensive, or is there a limit to this..."

My slides from the night are here. They probably don't make much sense without me jabbering for 10 minutes around them.

Thanks to Fjord/Flirtomatic for hosting the evening and Stuart John for his MCing sk1llz...