For Americans who've never been to Japan and played around with an imode handset, there's really no Stateside parallel to help them understand how enjoyable the experience can be. "I just cringe when I see handsets in America," says analyst Berman. The best analogy may be this: Whereas Japanese handsets are fun, colorful iMacs, those sold in the U.S. are drab, grim DOS terminals. To get an idea of what using imode is like, imagine clear colorful screens, startling sound quality, and easy-to-understand, icon-based menus navigating you through services you really want to use. And imagine this: sitting alone in a cafe with a grin on your face because you're having fun with your cellphone. In Japan, you can actually see this happening. It's not that the Japanese are deranged gadget freaks, it's simply that the cellphones are a kick to use. (And cute! Even grown men agree.)

"Frankly, the Japanese handsets are much better than what Nokia or Motorola make," says Berman. And high-quality cellphones, he believes, are critical to an imode-like service succeeding in the U.S.: "It's because they like the handsets that Americans are going to start playing. After that, the content has to latch them on. But handsets are the catalyst."

"If Americans saw what they could do on cellphones, they'd be much more excited," says Strother. "The handsets in Japan are exciting."

Japan's road to handset excellence is instructive. While other governments forced operators to bid for wireless spectrum licenses, the Japanese government decided instead not to cripple its operators with debt. Japanese operators used the savings to set up sophisticated R&D labs -- which most wireless carriers can only dream about -- and cooperated far more closely with handset makers than usually happens in other countries. The result: three successful wireless Web services and the world's best handsets.

The top handset sellers in Japan, according to Bucher, are, in order, NEC, Matsushita, Sharp, Mitsubishi, and Sanyo. Outside Japan, their bleeding-edge cellphones are largely unavailable. But that's changing, thanks in part to the spread of imode.

But if handsets in Japan are so cool, many ask, why haven't they been sold in the U.S.?

"We have this alphabet soup of technologies live in the market," explains Charles Golvin, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "If you wanted to sell to all the operators, up until recently you had to make a TDMA phone for AT&T Wireless, a GSM phone for VoiceStream, a CDMA phone for Verizon and Sprint -- and even within that you had other twists and turns. Japanese manufacturers saw a lot of complexity in managing the different technologies, so they pulled back. Now they're coming back to the U.S. market."

The initial handsets available for mMode don't represent the kind of Japanese invasion we're likely to see over the next few years. They include models from Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, and, later this year, Siemens. Cellphone junkie Hart gives his nod to the Sony Ericsson handsets: "I would say that Sony Ericsson is going to be the major player." In America, he says, "other phones don't even come close to theirs, especially the new ones coming out. I was a huge Nokia fan and user until the T68 came out. Since then, I think Sony Ericsson phones are bypassing Nokia's."

The T68 is an Ericsson phone, however, with little Sony input. As Golvin notes, Sony has barely begun to exert its influence in its joint venture with Ericsson. But later this year U.S. consumers will be offered what might be considered their first Japan-level handset: the Sony Ericsson P800, a lightweight Java PDA camera phone with an oversized, color screen and long-lasting batteries. "When the P800 comes out, it will be the best phone in the world," says Hart.

NEC, tops in Japan, also plans to reenter the U.S. market. And Berman notes that Vodafone, with the most subscribers worldwide, now owns a majority of No. 2 Japanese cellular operator J-Phone: "So Vodafone now has Sharp as one of their major handset suppliers, not to mention Sanyo and the others. Sharp's got very good handsets, and you're going see those all over." Vodafone owns 44.2 percent of Verizon Wireless, the No. 1 U.S. carrier. (AT&T is No. 3, after Cingular.)

In Europe, meanwhile, the imode services are being offered primarily or exclusively over Japanese handsets. KPN's imode, for example, requires a special handset made by NEC or, later this year, Toshiba. Matsushita, meanwhile, is set to supply the mobile phones for the French imode service.

This is just the beginning. Berman, asked if more Japanese handsets will be reaching Americans in the next few years, answers: "Oh, absolutely. It's going to start with imode, but the whole idea of the Japanese is that if 3G is a global standard, they're going to jump on that and make those handsets for the rest of the world. That's a serious threat to the traditional handset makers."

3G, or third generation, is generally defined as fast enough for video. But before they are widely available in the U.S., there will have to be 3G networks -- and that could take a while. In the areas where mMode is now in service, AT&T Wireless has set up a so-called "2.5G" GSM/GPRS network. But Strother notes that there's still no GSM/GPRS coverage in the vast majority of America, and that's just 2.5G, not 3G. "The future does involve Japanese handsets," he says. "But only as the networks get faster and better here -- and that's going to take years."

And even once the networks are in place, Japanese handset domination isn't inevitable. "It's a wide-open handset market, with regional and cultural differences," says Strother. "And I don't think the big boys are necessarily going to lose," he adds. "Nokia and Motorola are going to be right along with them."

Indeed, Nokia isn't exactly running scared: it has about 37 percent of the global handset market share. Motorola comes in second at around 17 percent, and had the foresight to establish itself early in China. None of the top five handset makers in Japan are represented in the top five global list.

But change happens, and if there's one thing that everyone who is in the know agrees on, it's that the handsets sold in Japan are much, much better than those sold in the U.S. and Europe. And they're leaving Japan this spring, riding the coattails of imode (at least until the bigger coattails of 3G come along). If nothing else, the traditional handset makers, like the Big Three automakers, will be forced to respond to the Japanese challenge with better products.

The upshot is simply this: Americans will -- soon -- finally get the kind of cool handsets that fueled Japan's imode explosion. And if they do, they might finally disprove the theory that they're too car-centric for cellphone-based data services.

Matthew Hart is ready to do his part. He's already got his sights set firmly on the upcoming P800 handset, and he's dreaming up how he's going to use it. His killer app for his killer phone? The ability to find local movie times, pay for tickets and have the charges show up on his phone bill. "Especially in Florida, where the movie theaters are huge and there's always a long line," he says. "That, to me, would be a great thing to use a cellphone for."

Question is, how many Americans will agree with him?

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