Joining the pack…

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a year now. It was originally written when I was living in Japan, and it was meant to go down a different road… Oddly, it seems to have come back into relevance, so I’m editing it to fit my desired theme and running with it:

If there’s one thing you notice when you first hit Japan, it’s that you stand out like a sore thumb. In this case, I’m not refering to the fact that I’m a 6′4″ anglo-european guy and was living in a country populated by predominantly 5′6″ asian people, but rather to the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone. Don’t get me wrong - I knew life without my cellphone would be bad. But this was seriously like having an arm cut off. Or possibly like discovering that all Santa’s left you for Christmas is a lump of coal and some socks (that’re really from Aunt Polly - but let’s face it, as a kid you don’t know what came from where). It’s that bad. So within the first week, I was off to Ikebukuro with a friend to get my very own 携帯電話. That’s cell phone for those of you who don’t speak the lingo. This happened again when I got back from Japan, too. In Japan, at least, many of my friends didn’t have cell phones either. In the US, I was the only one out of contact.

I recently rediscovered this unpleasant situation during the minor crisis I had with my laptop. I got it back Wednesday and was informed - to my utter horror - that “nothing is wrong with it”. That’s the kiss of death with troubleshooting computer problems, in layman’s terms it translates to “We have no idea what’s wrong, but we’re glad it’s not our problem anymore!” Fortunately, I’m a tech-savvy person and was able to fix the problem. Backed up a lot of my stuff, too - just in case. For one evening, though, I stared long and hard into the abyss and pondered the implications of an immediate future without my laptop. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

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Next-Gen Phones…

Click this link for another example of why the US makes me cry about the fact that I have to deal with its cell phone providers.

In Japan, my 3500 yen a month (about 28 dollars maybe?) got me unlimited e-mails, 40 minutes of calling (more than I needed in Japan - trust me), and something like 5000 text messages. There was a 3100 yen cancellation fee, a 3500 yen activation fee, and a nice new-model phone (albeit one without the “latest” features - still better than current US features) cost me 1 yen. The charger cost me 980 yen, which sucked, but they threw in an alarm clock, 2 cotton puffs, 2 packets of tissues, 2 packages of band-aids, 2 cell-phone straps, and 2 packages of Q-tips. Any thing incoming - calls, texts, e-mails, you name it - was free.

In the US, I have to pay $39.99 for 600 minutes a month (more than enough…), with some ridiculous “night and weekend” variance which activates at inconvenient times tacked on for little apparent reason, and I have to pay $4.99 a month for 400 text messages (incoming OR outgoing), and another $5.99 for the privilege to use their ridiculous “web browser”, which can’t even check my e-mail like I wanted it to. The only upshot this time is that, after 3 weeks of wrangling at them, I managed to get a nice phone for “free” with a $50 rebate. I might point out that the interface on this phone, unlike that of my Japanese phone, is ridiculously counter-intuitive, and the camera is 2nd-rate.

I miss Japan.

The next-gen phones in the link above… Especially the one that looks like a glass pebble… Wow. Just wow. I mean - I have no idea how well the interface works, but if the ease with which the iPhone seems to work is any indication, touch interfaces are the wave of the future indeed. I’m especially liking the use of a touch interface to replace the dialing pad because of the ability to swap out that pad for more useful interfaces when you’re not calling someone.

My only reservation, really, is about whether the touch pads will be resilient enough to handle the abuse people heap on their phones. The people I know who have iPhones are treating them like a new porsche - that is to say, they’re only driving them when they have to, and they’re doing their best not to scratch them - and as a consequence it’s hard to see just how resilient they really are…

Filed under “Not gonna happen…”

Dear readers,
Kudos and a shout-out to the first person to buy me one of these for a house-warming gift?

Optimus Prime, please. Always been an Autobot man…

On a related note, my cell phone will finally be arriving come (supposedly) next Thursday. Those of you who require the number will be informed.

That is all.
-E