From the Walkman to the camcorder, Japanese technology has routinely been years ahead of Europe and the US. Having a compact, geographically isolated population, with a high rate of adoption of new technology has meant innovations can reach the market far quicker than elsewhere.

The most recent gadgets to have found mass market favour in Japan are mobile phones with a built-in camera. Adverts for Ericsson camera-phones operating on T-Mobile's 2.5G system have appeared in the UK; Hutchison is desperately trying to launch the UK's first 3G service by the end of this year, offering us multimedia internet access on our phones.

So what else does Japan have up its Kimono sleeves? I recently tagged along with Labour MPs Derek Wyatt and Ian Gibson on parliamentary fact-finding meetings in Tokyo, to see what may lie in store for the British public. Our first destination was the offices of J-Phone, one of Vodafone's empire-building purchases and among the most successful mobile operators in Japan, with 12m subscribers. We were treated to a virtuoso display of mobile gadgetry: one phone took a video of us, then sent it to another phone across the room; then a phone was set to play an orchestral version of God Save the Queen, followed by a football chant.

Both Wyatt and Gibson are technically savvy: Wyatt, a former English rugby international, is a fierce proponent of broadband and constantly pesters ministers to get their act together. Gibson, a former science professor at the University of East Anglia, chairs the science and technology select committee and is similarly forward-thinking. They were quite chuffed by the experience.

The UK does have a 3G test bed - in the Isle of Man - and no doubt Hutchison or others will launch services to the rest of the country sometime next year, but the question of what services people will want remains in the ether. The Japanese are fond of small cartoons; they send these all the time. But except in the adolescent market, this may not take off in the UK.

In Japan, the most popular mobile content requests are for ring tones, downloaded by 71.2% of users. Next comes wallpaper for the colour monitor(46.4%), then news, weather, leisure information, traffic details and fortune telling (15.9%).

These figures were presented by Magnus Nerve at Cybird, which acquires mobile phone content and then pro vides it to the operators. "There has been a lot of growth in mobile internet," says Nerve.

"The most popular operator, DoCoMo, which introduced the i-mode phone, can access around 3,000 official internet sites and 53,534 unofficial sites." The importance of the i-mode phone is that it brings true internet compatibility on mobile phones much closer.

The phones being tested in Japan will increase this capacity, allowing access to the internet at a speed equivalent to a 100k modem. I-mode has been operating mobile games and other graphics on Java applications for two years. The increased speeds make it all the more likely that UK customers will want to follow suit.

Richard Clifford, an analyst at Datamonitor, believes Japan has led the way not only in technological innovation, but in business models: "In Europe, application developers had no incentive to deal with the mobile operators, because the terms offered were so poor. I-mode in Japan showed the way, offering to take 14% of revenue, leaving 86% to the developers. In Europe, the operators had wanted 40%."

Clifford is confident that 3G services will take off in Europe, despite the numerous difficulties in establishing the platform. Most recently, Telefonica of Spain and the Finnish company Sonera backed out of a deal to supply the German market with 3G. Commentators now predict that others will follow. The price paid for the licences has been ruinous: they can no longer deliver the goods. What the Japanese experience of 3G has taught us, however, is that the services appeal to a broad section of the public: more than 50m Japanese use mobile phones to access the internet.

This is at a point where there are still relatively few things to find on it. The signs are that once the internet and mobile telephony are more seamlessly integrated, we'll all be at it, when we're not videoing each other and sending the pictures around the world...