That we have SMS and Email and the Japanese have Sky and Long Mail is probably more than a coincidence. But then we have the Blackberry phenomena and now Nokia's push email solution? But maybe the latter two only work because they are used for business related stuff.

The Light-touch Japanese Experience

Japan has never had SMS, as DoCoMo was intelligent enough to see the similarity between email and shorter text messages early on. However, it does have a seperate type of e-mail it seems, which blurs the line a bit. Most Japanese will have two email addresses. One for their computer (i.e. gmail or hotmail) and one for their phone, and frequently they don't check the computer one often. My pre-paid phone has two options when you send a mail "sky mail" and "long mail". The first is similar to SMS. It has a 128 character limit and can include smileys. I think it is cheap or free to send these short messages to other japan mobile addresses. This is what most friends use to chat, gossip and meet up. This only works for other japanese mobile phones I think. There is also the option of long mail, where you plug in a normal e-mail address and have the full length options. This is more expensive, but not prohibitvely so.