Japanese Cell Phones Offer a Glimpse of the Future

Dynamoo writes "Vodafone K.K. have announced a new range of phones, available exclusively in Japan which easily beat everything else in terms of features. In particular, two phones from Sharp, the V402SH and V602SH between them boast a TV tuner, camera with optical zoom, virtual karaoke machine and dog bark translater (woof woof), according to this review. Perhaps some features are more useful than others, but with a bit of luck we'll see these features in worldwide mobiles sometime in 2005. In the meantime I guess I'll just have to learn to speak dog by myself."

Comments

Re:why is the US so far behind?

[sych]

It's your regulatory environment.

While in the USA, multiple different companies went off and developed multiple, incompatible systems (which weren't particularly future-proof), and Telcos even implemented different networks in different parts of the country, the Europeans got together and developed GSM (Global System for Mobile telecommunications), which I'm sure you've heard of by now.

They actually bothered to implement things like inter-network and overseas roaming, and anticipate the need for an upgrade path for future requirements. They also assigned and reserved radio spectrum across Europe, and much of Asia followed suit.

Meanwhile, the USA hadn't reserved the same spectrums, so even when US operators decided that the bigger GSM handset market was a good thing to be involved with, handsets from Europe and Asia still couldn't be used because they had to be modified to work on different frequencies!

It's one case where an unregulated, free and open market has been quite detrimental to consumers, and in fact the whole country.