I replaced the outdated cellular phone lately. Actually I wanted to wait for iPhone until released in Japan, but my cellular phone was really acting up. Also I have to change the carrier if I use iPhone. It comes from the particular kind of Japanese cellular phone market I bloged before.

However, I could buy really cool cellular phone which was designed by Kashiwa Sato who is famous Japanese graphic designer. Needless to say, I set the standby screen to the Mac OS X style.

I'm really disappointed but the Bluetooth is not installed (the cellular phone equipped with bluetooth doesn't exist in fact in Japan).
I was able to synchronize the data of iCal with the scheduler of the cellular phone by USB interface(Also it's by wired...). However, I don't think that I positively use this function(It's should be wireless).

By the way this cellular phone include mobile web browser (which was called i-mode on my carrier). My old cellular phone had same function but it only supported Shift-Jis encoding(because it's really old one). Now my new cellular phone supports UTF-8 encoding. This means I can use the bulletin board system that created by the RapidWeaver BBS on cellular phone. It's really convenience.
I'm into cellular phone situation of foreign country. I'd appreciate, if you make a comment about the cellular phone situation of your country.

Recent history about my project ...

tag : cellular phone

The rumor is that Apple Computer will release the cell-phone named "iPhone" next January. It seems "almost certain".
However, there is special market that is a "Carrier-driven market" (Sorry, I don't know exactly word in English) in Japanese cell-phone market. This means that each carrier has special own cell-phone hardware. So I can only buy a cell-phone that contracted carrier sells.
I think that this market structure is accelerating technical innovation of the cell-phone.
However each carrier develops proprietary technology. Also function of the cell-phone is pretty cutting-edge. But on another front, the Blue-tooth cell-phones are really few. (I have never used Blue-tooth function of my iMac.)

There are big 3 carriers (cell-phone operators) in Japan as of 2006 (excluded OKINAWA area and PHS).

• NTT DoCoMo (53%)
  
• KDDI (27%)
  
• SOFTBANK (15%)
  

I've been using cell-phone of NTT DoCoMo. This contract is by my company. (Company pays cell-phone fee)
However, the rumors are that the iPhone will be reselled by SOFTBANK. This means I can not buy iPhone.

I really don't like this Japanese cell-phone's market structure.
(This topic was a little hard to translating for me)

tag : cellular phone