Mobile phones are everywhere in Tokyo. On the metro trains, all you can see are countless people sending text messages using their i-mode phones. People thought it is a little strange of me, at home, to have a little Hello Kitty dangling from my phone, but here you’d never see a phone without one. The sheer choice of mobiles is impressive in Tokyo too, and make the ones in the UK look a little clunky. There seems to be a few main providers; DoCoMo, SoftBank, and Au by EDDI.
The phones here have similar functionality to those at home, but it’s the way in which people use them that’s different, so far as I can tell. Both the UK and Japan send a lot of text messages, although while we use SMS messaging, Japanese use i-mode email messaging. Even SMS messages are delivered using i-mode. The handsets have some nice features too, and stuff that could be available in the UK.
Japanese phones have a few features like; Chaku-moji, which sends a text or image message to the receiving handset when making a call. So you can send a text with the call telling the person you’re calling what the call is about. Chaku-motion, which is a video animation for incoming calls (something the UK has too of course), chara-den, a cartoon avatar you can use for video calls rather than your own face, i-channel, giving you graphical information from service providers such as weather reports etc, deco-mail, which allows you to use custom fonts and colours etc for your messages. i-appli, mobile applications such as stock tickers and games downloadable to your phone and osaifu-kaitai, which is an IC card function of the phone, which reads and writes data allowing you to use your phone as a portable purse to pay for goods in a shop, or as an airline ticket. Another function is omakase-lock, which allows you to remotely lock the phone if it gets stolen, or the person you’ve loaned it to is making too many calls – which is a thing that the UK really should bring in. The phones I’ve seen also seem to play media from the “data box” in formats including AAC, which is really rather good, as Advanced Audio Coding format – as used in Apple’s iTunes, and developed by Dolby, Nokia, Sony and a bunch of others – is a good format for media files, especially under 192Kbps.
Obviously text input is different to English text input, but it uses a similar method to English text entry. There is 5-touch, 2-touch and T9 entry modes. 5-touch gives you 5 characters per key, and will cycle through the 5 on each consecutive press. 2 touch gives you the 5 characters per key, but you can also use another key to shortcut to the first key’s character. So key 1 will offer you 5 characters, and pressing ‘2′ will select the second of those characters. Maybe you can do this with English phones too…I’m not sure as I use predictive text. Also there is the T9 input method which predicts characters that fit after the previous one. You can use “yomi edit” to correct mistakes that the phone makes in predicting characters.
The biggest difference though is in phone design, and there are some stunning models. My favorite here is the Foma N7031D, which looks really very nice. Lots of these phones offer TV too, which is really quite cool. I noticed the quality of TV that the phones can display, and was really impressed at their capabilities for streaming TV to phones, although the giveaway is a little circle at the top of the phone. Press this, and an small antenna pops out, that you can angle at 90 degrees when holding the phone sideways to watch it – so it’s transmitted TV I’m guessing.
Still, like everything, Japanese technology isn’t that far ahead, it’s just much cooler, much more ubiquitous, and much better understood and used than other countries.
