Because of the New Year holiday period in Japan, there’s not much new news to report on at the moment. However, the Japanese mobile news sites have plenty of ‘best of 2006’ features.

The ‘Keitai Watch’ news site counts down the best news stories of 2006 as voted by the website readers. Gaining 1,169 out of 6,275 total votes, the number one accolade goes to the start of mobile number portability (MNP) in Japan.

While there wasn’t a huge exodus of subscribers changing operators when MNP went live in November, its introduction has certainly shaped the year. In 2006 all operators stepped up a gear launching a record number of sparkly new handsets, innovative services and a bewildering array of special price plans.

Other notable entries were Vodafone’s acquisition by Softbank (#2), the start of OneSeg digital mobile TV (#4) and the launch of handsets with VGA screens, HDDs and 1 gb onboard memory (#7).

# posted by Jan Kuczynski @ 9:55 am