It seems that not much more than a few months ago there was hardly any good Japanese content for PDAs. Things look considerably different now. Three Japan-only readers for the Pocket PC (Bunko Viewer, T-Time and Xiino NewsViewer) are leading the market and the content market is exploding. In terms of news, all of Japan's major news publishers are jumping in with PDA content. Just this month Nikkei and Asahi have announced new content offerings using the Xiino NewsViewer to add to Yomiuri and Mainichi who have had offerings for some time. And these aren't just once-a-day-update, black and white, text-only headlines you might have become accustomed to - the content is colorful, contains pictures and is updated as often as once every 15 minutes in the case of Asahi. The reader software is user friendly and you can store the content on a memory card so no need to worry about filling up your RAM. The content costs only around 300 to 600 yen ($3-$6) a month and with some publishers offering free samples and opening campaigns now is a good time to be taking a look.
News is not the only category expanding, the appearance of both fiction and non-fiction books is also exploding. PDABook as its name suggests provides a wide range of books designed especially for PDAs. Airbitway is another company giving the market a great boost with a very well designed store. Not only content, their offering is an impressive line-up divided into news, magazines, comics, books, applications & utilities, games, interest & lifestyle, learning, maps & guides and characters & backgrounds. 
And you really know when something is taking off when Japan's largest mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo launches an impressive eBook portal - M-stage book - that has obviously taken significant investment (and has a number of good free samples to try out). 
Not only that, but they are also supporting the emerging format for mobile content in Japan XDMF. Later this year you can expect to be able to view this format on DoCoMo mobile phones which can only boost the overall mobile content market, and there is plenty of space for both phones and PDAs to compete as the platform of choice. Further good news, is that readers with integrated dictionaries, which are not currently available for the commercial content, are also expected within the next few months.
As a final note it is interesting to note how once again, Japan held back for so long on entering this market, but now they have done so the move is powerful and compelling. With commercial audio content already available for download to SD cards at convenience store kiosks, you can be sure it won't be long until the mobile PDA market evolves from text and graphic content to full audio and video content just a few clicks away from your mobile unit of choice.
