I was reading Slashdot and came across a link to this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/27/guardianweeklytechnologysection.mobilephones
As someone living in Japan and using a Japanese cell phone, reading this article really pissed me the fuck off. The writer either has little use for mobile technology outside of the precanned bullshit they put on these phones or is so into the hype he can’t tell what features are useful.
The ‘tattoos’ mentioned are little bar codes read by the camera on the phones. They do nothing but turn into a URL. It is a fucking advertisement. So damned cool.
The ‘killer app’ here is one I find fucking terrible. I don’t want to use some wanker email address assigned to my phone. I want to use MY email. I want to use a SSH client to read MY email. If I unfortunate enough to prefer Exchange, I’d want to use THAT. Blackberry got that so damned right.
And since when have the phones been nice here? I find them larger than I prefer and plastic fantastic. (That is not a complement.) Sure some have nice features like VGA screens and others have 3G High Speed (but in limited areas). But what good is that if you can’t connect the fucker to a computer and access the Internet. What the fuck are you going to download at fantastic speeds on your phone?
I haven’t owned a Blackberry (or hell even a phone before this so I can’t comment on how shitty the user interface is on other handsets) but I have supported them for work. So I do have experience with them. They work a hell of a lot better than most Japanese phones (and I haven’t tried every one but only a few of them even have a chance at being usable). The jog wheel is huge here. And for the Blackberries that aren’t shitty (read: have qwerty keyboards), they are vastly superior.
And anyone mentioning Japanese TV in a positive context obviously hasn’t seen Japanese TV. It is shit. It is a value added feature and all and they even have a whole broadcast technology for it (One Seg) and it is even free (TV in Japan is taxed, mobile TV isn’t). However, it adds a LOT of bulk and expense to the phone. No one seems to dig small slim phones. Cultural difference I suspect.
I also like how the article seems to think a country of people buried in their cell phones is a good thing. It sure beats people interacting with each other. That is something that doesn’t happen in Japan. Strangers do not start conversations with each other. They don’t make small talk. They prefer digging into their cell phones.
This isn’t the first article with this kind of content on this subject I have read. I didn’t even give it second thought before I became a phone carrying member of the Japanese populace. But now that I am, I know it was written by someone who is not familiar enough with his topic… or has such contempt for his audience, he would spoon feed them drivel.