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Why Japan Gets the Cool Stuff
haahr writes "Good article about why the coolest electronics products are available first in Japan and may never make it to the U.S., in Slate."
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I'm just angry that it takes so long to get my translated import copy of Urine Cop VI. The japanese make my kinda stuff, but oh, the waiting!
1. The Japanese have a national obsession with gadgets. They just can't get enough of them.
2. Japanese companies will give Japanese consumers what they want.
What's next on Slate? Articles telling us that Italians like pasta, Russians like vodka and Brazilians like football?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Look at...
g r ce3
OS X
iMac
iMac2
iBook
iPod
PowerBook
Handsprin
Newton
Palm Pilot
CrossPad
ViaVoice
Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty
Spider-Man
Lord of the Rings
The Matrix
The Matrix:Revolution
VooDoo
VooDoo2
GeForce
GeFo
GeForce4
Quake3
Doom3
I'm sure there are more.
GPL Deconstructed
Doesn't this article look like a big advertisement for at Dynamism importing?
The Japanese are experts in small
Sony. Because caucasians are too damn tall.
perhaps because they aahh make them. Same reason why mexico has the best mexican food, and aaah irland has the bast dark ale
Since when did David Lynch start making mice for laptops? I know I would pay extra for a dark and disturbing, surreal input device. I guess Japan really does get all the cool new stuff...
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Japanese companies keep their staff employed for more than six months at a time.
A minor point, but meetings don't make money, and middle managers don't build products.
If you take a trip to Japan and buy some electroncs, etc, be sure and carry your passport with you to the store and you will be exempted from paying the 5% sales tax.
They will fill out a little card, put a stamp on it, and staple it into your passport. When you exit the country, they will take the little card out of your passport.
Some of the the electronics stuff is labelled to run on 100V AC, but it works fine over here. And remember, don't buy a DVD player unless you really want the region 3 encoding!
The only stuff that comes first to Japan is the stuff that is made in Japan. Everything else gets here way late, or never gets here at all.
I'm still waiting for the concept of office LAN's, firewalls, and relational databases to really catch on here.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The Japanese economy is quite sad. A (w)hole nation of Enrons. They only hope that the can let the hot air out slowly, and that it doesn't burst.
The trend of the 80's for American companies to bring in Japanese consultants has been reversed. Japanese corporations are now bringing in American consultants to show them how to emulate American prosperity.
I'd like to see the Japanese make a better on one of those.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In the end it all boils down to money.
We have too many conglomerates that won't spend to produce "cool" gizmos unless they can make huge returns.
They aren't interested in providing a service because it would be useful, rather only to make money.
No sig for you!!
I agree that those statements are offensive. It is a good thing that they were not included in the article referenced, or I really would have been angry.
My other first post is car post.
I'd guess they've lost market share as Windows has improved and offered improved i18n support, as well as cooler hardware from Sony and Toshiba.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
his being stationed in Japan.
He had some interesting stories:
You would get your check in USD and stand in front of the bank line waiting for a favorable exchange rate between USD and YEN. Then when the numbers were right, the tellers would be mobbed.
There was this huge gomi pile of abandoned electronics that were almost brand new but no longer wanted; because there was a new model that just came out that had more gee wiz features.
If money falls on the street in Japan, it will usually lie there till it rots or is cleaned up and thrown away; he said it was beneath Japanese to pick up money or objects that have fallen on the ground.
People walk into a sushi/food bar and pick from freshly prepared items on a conveyor that moves past the patron. You pay on the way out.
People regularly sleep in what seems like morgue cabinets. Complete with miniature amenities.
What an interesting place!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
iMac Girl
However, there, as with everywhere else, you must contend with the Micros~1 OS monopoly. None of my Japanese games are Mac compatible, I don't know how big that market is, to say nothing of Office software.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The reasons for Japan's preeminence in consumer electronics is simple, and completely absent from this article. The major reason is plain: kaizen.
Japan has a different system of product development. It dates back to ancient methods of production of artworks like lacquerware. Specialists in certain production methodologies allow the tasks to be separated. Many specialists were hereditary lineages, some families had practiced and continuously improved their techniques over hundreds of years.
And THAT is kaizen. Each product builds on the strengths of the previous generation, and eliminates weaknesses (or at least tries another approach). The Western approach is to build a product (or the packaging, at least) from scratch each time. Kaizen products are frequently updated, with minor incremental improvements. In many ways, it is a predecessor to Open Source methods like "release early and often" or "many eyes make bugs transparent."
The other factor is the short lifetime of fads in Japan. Fads like the Tamagotchi build to hysterical intensity in mere weeks. I still have an ad from the Asahi Shimbun with an apology from the President of Bandai. He apologizes at the inadequate supply of Tamagotchi, and promises Bandai is building new plants and within 2 months they will be able to produce 2million units a month. Unfortunately the fad was over long before the plants got up to speed, and Bandai ended up with millions of units they couldn't even give away. Bandai lost billions of yen and the President had to resign. So you've got to be nimble to keep up with quick-moving fads.
So anyway, how come complete idiots with NO knowledge of Japan get paid to write crap like that article? Jeez, the stuff I just wrote is far more informative than Slate's rubbish. I wonder if the author has evern BEEN to Japan.
Well, all the cool stuff in Akihabara isn't in the flashy storefronts right on the street. Those are mostly just nationwide chains.
The cool stuff is in the dark wet alleys between the department stores, where you can buy "parts" -- surplus chips and cables and circuit boards and random pieces of bizarre hardware that the big computer companys dump there.
Oh, and it's the only place in Japan you can buy uncensored porn, forgot to mention that.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
and based on the prices I saw on some of the units for sale, I strongly doubt they come with legally licensed software.
hehe. only on msn will you find journalism like that.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Actually it's a big question. We are afraid to test the waters and move forward. While we pioneered these technologies Japan will put a semiconductor in anything - at least once.
America is quite like the fall of the Victorian Empire. She has become a nation afraid of progress and if something doesn't change she won't stay towards the top of the heap.
Off-topic, somewhat:
There is more, that is actually on topic, but I can't find the page now. I don't want to misquote either. Basically we pioneered that technology, invented the PC but the majority of parts aren't even made here - and I don't mean assembly - I mean the companies who own the RAM factories etc.
This is just a preview of things to come.
Get your Unix fortune now!
"I will not expose the flaws in the slashdot moderation system."
And clean the brushes when you're done!
The Japanease government provides a considerable assitance and incentive for their companies to cooperate as well. Such a proposition is unheard of in the US, where much effort is spent ensuring systems DON'T inter-operate, all in the name of profit. SMS is a prime example, in Europe or Japan, you can cross systems seamlessly, such a simplistic seeming idea would take an act of god here.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Ahem... the Japanese taxpayer pays more to support the US bases in Japan than the US taxpayer ever did. It's part of the agreement.
The Japanese electronics companies, (and many american ones), use the US military AAFES and NAVEX stores overseas to test market a LOT of stuff.
Certain lines, or models, or even entire formats get a testdrive at the larger military stores. They have a captive, technoid, consumer group. if it flies there, you may see it in BestBuy.
Anyone remember the ElCassette? Mid '70's cross between a cassette deck, and a reel to reel. Fidelity of a reel, with the pop-in convienience of a cassette. I had a Technics model. Of course, they didn't sell that well, so it never showed up in the States.
> Americans typicaly spend much more money on things like mortgages,
> cars, and insurance than the Japanese do.
Nice theory, but not likely. Have you seen typical Japanese rents? For that matter, even the average European apartment rent is higher than the average American mortgage. Cars maybe, but not apartments. Even so, cars might not sell well in large Japanses cities, but overall Japan is still one of the largest automobile consumers in the world, so someone must be buying them.
Then they came for the Japanese, but I didn't watch anime, so I didn't care...
Statements like "The Japanese are a close-minded, insular people without any of the warm, loving characteristics of Europeans." is not only false, it is dangerously close to Nazism.
What makes the Libretto so great is that it takes up very little space. At 10.5 inches wide by 6.6 inches deep, it actually sits between the keyboard and monitor of my desktop, allowing me to check mail on one machine while running Photoshop full-screen on the other.
Wow, that "feature" alone makes me wish I had $2k to dump into a product like that. At work I have a 15" monitor and PC next to my 15" Dell (L)Attitude screen, just so I can have my email up all the time. Email is becoming enough of a killer app for some people where it is worth paying for a device like this which really is a PC, not some crippled appliance to fufill solely that function.
This may be an emerging market segment. I believe the whole Japanesse only thing has to do with the culture of the companies. Car companies are the same way, just look at the Nissan Skyline, Subaru WRX (now here), Mitsubishi Lancer (an not the crap they are selling in the US now), etc. Electronics companies are no differrent.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Great, so the Japanese have an even GREATER affinity for buying shit that probably doesn't work as well as its advertised to work, that they don't need in the first place, and that they probably can't even afford, than we do.
Is that something to celebrate about?
The most important decision for one should be cost-effectiveness, overall. That doesn't necessarily mean just the purchase price, but everything considered.
I'm sitting in front of a 19" monitor. It is big; it takes up a lot of room in all dimensions. It costed me about 300 dollars. Now, I could have spent and extra 300 dollars or so and gotten a flat-screen monitor.
That would definately be smaller and cooler.
But would it be worth it to me?
Well, NO.
I have plenty of space, so size is not an issue. I also value resolution and monitor integrity, so the flat-screen would blow. Flat screens have poor resolution (ever tried reading fine text on a flat-screen?), and their colors change depending on the angle you view them from. Also, I find the edges of flat-screen monitors to be very annoying.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Actually, it is not unusual to see a honeydew melon priced at $500 in gift shops in Ginza -
The other day, I saw one of those cube-shaped watermelons in Shibuya for about a hundred bucks.
$15 apples are not uncommon, too.
Of course, nobody buys them to take home and eat - they are gifts for very special occasions.
One reason for the idea of fruit as a valued gift is that they have a very limited lifespan - they are consumables. If you give somebody a vase or a picture frame, then visit them 6 months later, you will expect to see it somewhere around their house. Not so with an apple or a melon. People don't have the space for useless crap here the way they do in America. (Though people often reserve some space in their house for useless old crap from grandparents...)
If you think about it, it's not so different than other countries - I've seen $1500 bottles of wine, which are basically just bottles of old grape juice.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
To here an American say that. May I welcome you to a place known as the rest of the world.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I think the reason Japan has so much cooler stuff is that they are willing to take risks. In the USA, if a particular device or software/game is not going to "make millions" by attracting mainstream buyers, then there is little chance it would ever make it to the market. Publishers and manufacturers here want to take only the safest bets. Ever wonder why the USA is full of so many crappy movies, games, and me-too products? Why take a risk when you can copy something proven?
In Japan, they release just about anything that their minds and conjure up. Surely they have the same economic business sense as those in the USA, but perhaps their consumer market is much more willing to risk buying innovative stuff (this is basically what the article seems to conclude). Also, maybe because of Japan's small size, companies don't have to spend very much money on initial production runs?
Not, of course, your maths: 2002 - 1991 (ignoring a few non-recession years in the middle) = 11 years...
But: I remember in 1990 discussing with an American friend of mine (I'm British) that an Economist article said that Japanese productivity growth was significantly lower than in the US.
He laughed, and told me (basically) that the US was doomed and that we would all be speaking Japanese in 10 years.
Oh how times change...
--- My dad's political betting
I would think that the obvious answer to why Japan gets things first is that they are closest to the International Date Line. It always gives Japan a huge jump on the rest of the world. ;-)
Gah! I forgot about that - very true.
-- My Weblog.
I can't help but think that a lot of what keeps stuff out of the US sooner are the regulations that go into a lot of electronic products.
I can think of quite a few things. I think of Celphones (any Nokia phone takes forever to get approval here), pieces of Video Equipment with low pass filters that the FCC puts on to protect other things from being interfered.
It's the way that things work in america. With the FCC, with the FDA, anything like that. America isn't bleeding edge like Japan, but we do it for a reason. It prevents us from putting out headache medicines that cause birth defects in children, and Cell-phones that disrupt pacemakers.
That's life.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
That's what I want to know: did Dynamism.com pay Slate for this infomercial, or did they just pay the "journalist" directly?
So the Japanese are a trendy people in a crowded country? That's news? Here's some more news: Americans are big cowboy-looking folks, constantly pioneering the next frontier. Brits keep a stiff upper lip, and they have to, too, because their food is so horrid! Germans are big on punctuality and order....
Here's some more news: you read Slate, so clearly you're not up to buying a laptop in Japan or on eBay, and figuring out where to get the right drivers! Oh no! You read Slate, you use Microsoft OSes, and you need your hand held when it comes to those daunting techie questions!
That's why it's so much MORE cost effective for you to PAY 30% ABOVE RETAIL for Dynamism.com to take care of it for you. After all, those trendy Japanese will pay almost anything to get it one inch smaller! Aren't YOU that trendy? You're not a LOSER are you? Prove it by giving Dynamism.com $500 bucks for installing an OS and shipping Airmail from Japan. Did we mention that all the cool kids get their toys at Dynamism.com?
By the way, it's Dynamism.com. Did we mention Dynamism.com?
Admittedly, the author concludes he won't pay the mark-up, so I'm probably going overboard. But I don't buy the pop-sociology, and it still reads like an infomercial.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I haven't owned a corvette but I've driven a few.
All but one handled extremely well! (The one that
handled just "well" was a '59 vette, which handles like a bel-air).
It's no Saab, but I would call it "poor" handling ever.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Nice effort, however.
-bugg
With the voltage conversions transformers so cheap you just have to watch out for the possible 50Hz gear.
Bleh!
I've heard this kind of talk since the early 80's. We keep waiting for it to happen and it doesn't.
But it's really been happening since the 70's. Read the book.
Why is the phrase "Japanese Innovation" nearly an oxymoron?
Innovation is one thing, making money and controlling the markets is important also.
Get your Unix fortune now!
"keitai" just means portable. You can have a keitai nanny goat if you put a handle on her.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
For years the Japanese have been keeping some of the best Video games to themselvs; mostly the puzzle games, war sims and RPGs, and indeed, even great consoles in their many variations like the PCEngine.
Importers made (make) a fortune out of these "Japan Only" games, and when you get them, learning how they work is a puzzle on top of the game itself.
Very rarely, there is a software switch to turn English on in a game; Klax for example on Hu Card had this feature, but that was written in the USA.
You can forget titles like "Strip Mah Jong" having english switches.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Sorry to be naive, but isn`t the reason that the Japanese electronics industry (and infrastructure) is so advanced is becuase of the terms of the VJ-day treaty, which prohibits Japan from ANY military R spending. SO that all the guys who would have made weapons of mass destruction work for Sony, et al? The same level of R that has been put into Military uses in the US and UK has been piled into gadgetry in Japan. Similarly, their infrastructure is so advanced becuase the government has speant nothing on defence in over 50 years.
Just my $0.02
alnya
I'm looking for an MP3 player which is small, light, can be taken running and has several gigs capacity.
Maybe no such thing exists, but if it does, then importing from Japan would seem to be the most obvious choice.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Perhaps Japanese cell phones work in all of Japan and perhaps even at the same price. Japanese companies are pretty good about responding to what sells, so this would make sense.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
If you visit the area, small chance that you will come away with only "some" electronics. They have some unbelievable stuff there, and the things that are sold in the West will be unbelievably cheap sometimes. Oh, if you forget your passport, ask for the taxfree deal anyway. Some shops are not too particular about giving you the discount slip anyway. Also, the sales staff in many shops in Akihabara will on demand whip out their PDA's with wireless internet conn, and find out which DVD model can be made region free and how.
That is what I miss most from Japan. Hassle-free wireless Internet, anytime, anywhere, at ISDN speeds and at very decent rates. The best we can do with GSM, after all this time, is GPRS, which is (in the Netherlands anyway) 56K max (if you're on top of the antenna and no one else is around), and is charged at a whopping 2-5 euro/$1-$2.5 per MB.
Another note on difference in how toys and electronics fit in their culture: it is not just the younger male population that craves toys. A stroll around Akihabara may reveal:
- A 65 year old guy playing a playstation 2 on a display stand, fanatically fighting a younger boy in some fighting game.
- 2 Girls in a high-school uniform, in the process of buying a CD rom burner, with the intent of building it into their machine themselves.
- A boy taking his girl out to an arcade, or even groups of girls visiting an arcade to play the games.
- An older executive type frantically whacking away at some game in the same arcade, briefcase on the floot next to him.
- When an office computer, copier or whatever fails and the user happens to be lady, they don't run to the nearest male crying for help like they do in the west (well, mostly), they start whacking it or taking it apart like most men would.
To say that the Japanese are more toy-minded does not even begin to describe the cultural difference.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The vast majority of Japanese will never have a oportunity to have a expensive mortgage to pay off, & don't have rooms for boats, caravans or even cars. So they really have buggerall alternatives than to spend their money on gadgets.
In other places people either can't afford to spend their money on gadgets, or if they do have the required incomes, they have the mortgage alternative.
Japan - high-powered economy where you're married to your job. Everybody is rich by American standards, and so money is no object when buying a laptop or anything. A tie costs minimum $300.
America - a nation of trailer-trash, the society is so uncohesive and individualistic that only megacorporations with standardised employment and IP contracts can cooperate effectively. Small and medium size businesses just rip each other off, no sense of trust nor honour, resulting in a "grab what you can from those assholes" culture. It's so bad that if some guy in the street walk up to you and offers you a laptop for $200 cash you'll immediately assume it's stolen or there's something wrong with it. Despite this Americans expect good service. The only way to get money is to dazzle people with something they don't understand to get their money (e.g. dot-coms and Enron) to play on the American fear of looking incompetent at your job (you are what you do). I've never heard an American say, "I'm incompetent at my job, I'm useless, sorry." I think just saying so will cause confusion in Americans
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Uh, a lot of the principles of modern kaizen were developed by an American guy named W. Edwards Deming based on the work of a former Bell Labs (another one) employee named Walter Shewhart (who invented something called Statistical Process Control). Granted, Deming did most of his work on the project in Japan, where he went at the request of the US military during the occupation in the '50s, ostensibly to teach the Japanese "American business methods."
However, what the military didn't know or didn't realize was that Deming had some ideas of his own that he'd been trying to get US industry to adopt for years. Most US industry at the time wasn't interested in the concept of systemic quality, however. (Most of them were satisfied with Quality Inspections and an "acceptable defect rate.") The Japanese adopted the idea wholeheartedly, after hearing Deming lecture. The Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, the Japan Management Association, and the Japan Standards Association supported the lectures, along with the US military. Eventually, Japanese scholars like Kaoru Ishikawa added some new ideas (like Quality Circles) to the mix.
In North America, the resulting system is usually called Total Quality Management. It started in Japan, but it started because of W. Edwards Deming, who was really instrumental in turning Japanese productive systems into the powerhouses they are today. (Ask your parents and grandparents about the time when "Made In Japan" meant "This Is Junk.")
On the other hand, to be fair to the Japanese, they adopted the system almost overnight, and used it to become a world manufacturing superpower, more or less, in under 10 years. US industry is still trying to get used to kaizen/TQM, even though the basic system's been around for almost 50 years...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I write this to remind you if your responsibility towards the the reader community. Please NEVER NEVER NEVER again post a link [to the slate article] that links further away to sites like dynamism.com. This is torture. I don't know how many divorces, maxed out credit cards and spontaneous Japan trips this will result in, but one thing is for sure... Checking out the slimtops and gadgets on that page got me shivering like a crack addict that has a rock the size of the Washington monument in clear view.
Thank you.
(gotta clear the line for airline reps to call me back...)
+++ath0
Couldn't find exact data on it, but from the Peters projection (a map projection that conserves relative area) Europe looks to me to be slightly smaller geographically than the US, but not by much. (Note: Russia isn't really part of Europe)
However, I'm pretty sure the total population of Europe is greater than the US, but again, I don't remember the figures.
It used to be that Apple was king of the hill in Japan. The compact "classic" format was perfect for a society where space was at a premium and small was beautiful. And MacOS was the first with Kanji support...it took Microsoft until Windows 2000 to get that right.
Now they aren't. I suspect Sony did them in. Sony's VAIO computers are PCs made for Japanese tastes. The fact they do well here in the States is just gravy for them.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
There are places like this in the US too. "Frying Fish" in Little Tokyo has a conveyor belt thing going on too. There's a place in Palo Alto like this too. The old New Meiji chain here in Los Angeles had a few places with conveyor belts...the one in Marina del Rey was super-cool.
Basically in all places you stack up your plates after you eat each order of sushi. There are people who go from table to table and tally up what they see from time to time. Once you are done, you ask for your bill. Usually it's a lot more than you had budgeted for...mmmmm...sushi... ^_^;
A net-friend of mine always visits his family for Oshogatsu (New Year's Holiday) For the past couple of years Iron Chef has had a special every New Year's, and he tapes it and brings the tape home to the US and trades it. (However, after the travesty that was "Iron Chef Japan Cup 2002 I don't think there will be any more of them) He doesn't cut the commercials...which actually is quite cool. Japanese commercials are a total hoot.
It was very funny to see a commercial for "Kappa Sushi" which apparently is the big "McSushi" kind of place in Japan...the kids are basically begging Mommy to go take them for sushi. You would NOT see that here. "Eww, sushi...Mom, let's go to Chuck E. Cheese!"
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Unemployment rose from 5.8 percent in May
Unemployment only measures those receiving UI. The real unemployment rate is probably double what's reported.
So you know a half-dozen people who are unemployable. Big deal.
It's a big deal for them.
We had a huge run up in the supply of workers and a huge drop in demand for them
A huge drop in demand? I thought unemployment was only 6%?
The Bloomberg article quotes support my point:
Unemployment rose from 5.8 percent in May
The U.S. economy grew at a 6.1 percent annual rate
That's companies laying off workers to boost the stock price.
The fact is, people are out of work, and when they do find work, it's temporary at best, and underpaid. Companies are still laying people off TODAY by the tens of thousands while the economists claim 6.1% growth, and people who are qualified to do just about any job can't get work running 10-keys and filing. The rest are stocking shelves at Wal-Mart to pay off their student loans. They're told they are "overqualified" at interviews while they borrow money to feed their kids.
An economy that fails to keep it's best minds employed is a failed economy.
Yeah, I'm fully aware of "roaming" being a purely administrative issue. (If one company owned all the towers, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd care which tower your call happened to be carried on.)
My point, though, is that with a large enough country, you'll most likely have several competing providers - and thereby such hassles as roaming charges. Cell towers aren't exactly cheap to install and maintain. When you cover a large number of square miles, it starts to cost much more to send your installation and repair techs out to all of those remote locations.
Japan may have much more population density, but at least they don't have some company trying to maintain a group of cell towers over 1,500 miles away.
As far as Canada and Australia having better cellular coverage than the U.S. - it's entirely possible. I've never made a cellular call in either of those countries. The U.S. is behind the times in several ways when it comes to telecommunications. It's sort of the curse attached to our being first with the original phone technologies. I remember Canadian friends telling me about cheap T1 circuits into their homes and inexpensive ISDN lines before that. In the U.S. - ISDN has generally been a rip-off. $149 a month or so for 128K of bandwidth was the norm here in the Midwest. Our telcos didn't want to offer it until the federal trade commission ruled that they had to offer it everywhere by a certain date. It required a number of phone switch upgrades, so they wanted all the ISDN users to pay for those upgrade costs. In other parts of the world, the newer phone switches were all they had installed to begin with - so adding these services was pretty inexpensive and easy.
I agree the Fujitsu is a worthy competitor and bests the Libretto in most categories. However, the Libretto does beat the P-Series in some aspects -
Video: The P-Series uses the rather archaic ATI Rage chipset, which is rather embarressing in this day and age. The Libretto has the much more impressive ATI Mobile Radeon
Keyboard: The Libretto's 18mm pitch is slightly larger than 17mm on the P-Series. Okay, this is only a tiny difference, but for the amount of typing I do, I would prefer as large as possible.
Size: I'm kind of ambivalent about the DVD/CD-RW on the P-Series. On one hand, it's certainly cool to have it double as a really slick portable DVD player, and burning ability is nice. On the other hand, I rarely use the CD-R on my PC. Sure, once in a while I burn something, but most of the time, I just use it to install a program and that's about it. I'm sure I could get by without a drive on my portable and it would make it that much more svelte and smaller.
Overall, though, I would agree the P-Series is a more attractive package. It's got a larger resolution, firewire, SPDIF, S-video out... not to mention it's availabe and supported in the states (for a very attractive price). No need to import direct or pay Dynamism's markup.