Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is this for blind people?
Japanese dogs don't go "woof-woof" they go "wan-wan".
And cats go "nya-nya"
Just thought I'd clear that up before you rushed out to buy one for your non-japanese pets.
Man, my dog talks like a sailor. He's all "get me some fucking dogfood, goddamnit" this and "you best be taking me for walk, shithead" that.
"Honestly, who would want to watch TV on a cell phone? "
Somebody who's at a restaraunt waiting to be served. Somebody taking a dump at work. Somebody trying to find out what happened after an Earthquake and all the power's out. Somebody riding the bus. Somebody taking a...
"Derp de derp."
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.
They actually want to make a regular computer inside the cell phone.. I actually want a cell phone that can be heard everywhere, with a nice battery and perhaps send pictures and such (which can already be done).
I don't even want that much. Was with you until you said pictures. All I want is a phone with a good battery life and a decent address book. I don't mind a few other features (such as a calculator or a few simple games like Tetris to pass the time if I am stuck at the airport) but they had better not murder my battery life or distract me from the main features of the phone.
My Kyocera 2325 suits me quite nicely. The address book is superb (I love the auto-dial feature where it matches letters that I type to the contacts book -- can call my GF by typing in "788" or my boss by typing in "726" -- that's the coolest speed-dial feature I've ever seen -- much nicer then a list of speed-dial numbers that need to be remembered), the SMS interface is sleek enough and it has the calculator mode that I desire. The battery will last about three days even with fairly heavy usage (I am landline free so I make all my calls on the cell) -- what more could you ask for? Sometimes less is better.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.