Posts filed under Japanese Phones

Japanese phones used to be years ahead of anything we had here in Europe and decades ahead of those in the US, but not any more. The latest US and European smartphones are super-slick devices with gorgeous user interfaces, while the latest Japanese phones are almost the exact opposite.

Take these two new Japanese phones, for example. The top one is the KDDI Lotta (derived from the English word ‘lot’, which, amusingly, KDDI seems to think means “luck”!), which was designed to be minimalist and inexpensive.

Although it’s obviously unfair to compare it to the much more expensive iPhone, it looks bland, and it hardly has any features – it doesn’t even have Bluetooth!

Compared to the LG Pop, which is a low-end phone sold across Europe and the US that manages to add a touchscreen and smart user interface for a similar price, the KDDI Lotta looks like something from the 1990s!

But worse is to come though…

Japanese phones are an odd mix of extraordinary features and unrelenting ugliness! Almost as one, they’re block-like slabs of phone with a few twisty bits, but telling one apart from the other is virtually impossible.

Unless, that is, you throw them in a metre of water and leave them there for half an hour. Take the phones out, and the only one that’s still working will be the Fujitsu F-01A – the world’s first waterproof mobile phone.

Sony Ericsson have announced a brand new music phone in the shape of the Sony Ericsson Xmini. As its name suggests, the Xmini is tiny. So tiny, in fact, it’s smaller than an iPod Nano! At just 44mm (W) × 75mm (H) × 18mm (D), the little Xmini barely has enough room for a screen, let alone a keypad!

Sony Ericsson therefore had no choice but to make it a slider, but even then, the keys on the keypad are tiny.

More details and pics after the jump.

Samsung have announced the new Samsung W600, a new touchscreen mobile phone that uses new HSUPA technology that enables it to upload data at speeds of up to 5.76Mbps. HSUPA is part of the HSDPA family of protocols, but whereas HSDPA focuses on optimizing download speeds, HSUPA focuses more on upload speeds.

Obviously, downloading is seen as more of a priority than uploading, and so HSDPA phones have been around for over a year now, whereas HSUPA has seen little attention. The Samsung W600 changes all that, offering upload speeds faster than the majority of broadband connections.

The first Google Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, may be only days away from launch (October 30th for the UK), but in Japan, Yahoo! is making waves, at least as far as Sharp is concerned. What you see here is the new Sharp 9225H smartphone, which, as you can see, features a full QWERTY keyboard that snaps open in a similar way to the Nokia E90.

Remember the Yamaha Music Phones that I blogged about a few days ago? They’re a series of concept phones made by Yamaha for Japanese mobile operator KDDI, each of which combines the humble mobile phone with a musical instrument. There was the Trumpet Phone (or TrumPhone, as someone suggested!), drum phone, synth phone, and three others.

Interesting concept, I bet you were thinking, but these phones are just concepts – there’s no way you can produce any real music on them.

Oh really? Just check out the video taken by Akihabara News. I thought the sounds they made were going to be OK, but not much more than you get from an old 16-bit arcade machine.

Boy was I wrong!

Check out the video after the jump.

This bizarre looking mobile phone isn’t, as you might expect, a concept phone, or a prototype, or even some Frankenstein-phone cobbled together from old bits of meccano by a devout Transformers fan. It is, in fact, the new SoftBank 815T PB mobile phone, made by Toshiba, and which is actually going on sale!

As you can see, it’s a genuine Transformer lookalike, but with the addition of full mobile phone functionality – including 3G, QVGA screen and a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera.

More pics and details of SoftBank’s new transformer-phone after the jump.

Hitachi have announced the new Hitachi W61H clamshell phone, the main claim to fame of which is a body that can display 95 different patterns on the back at the touch of a button. Similar in concept to Nokia’s old xPress On covers, where you could snap on a new cover to customize your phone, Hitachi’s new design, called “Silhouette Screen” is a little more sophisticated.

Rather than using physical bits of plastic that have to snapped on and snapped off, the W61H uses e-Ink technology, similar to that used in e-Book readers such Amazon’s Kindle. The whole back of the phone therefore acts as a separate display, but rather than displaying info, it simply displays a pattern.

More details after the jump.

The latest Japanese phones from NTT DoCoMo offer a novel feature that could be life-saving. Called Area Mail, the new feature provides quick emergency reports delivered to mobile phones in a specific area, with dedicated ringtones and messages used to alert the user to an impending emergency.

Given that Japan is one of the most seismically-active regions on Earth, an earthquake warning system is the obvious application of Area Mail, which can send its alerts out to mobile phones within an area identified as most at risk. This has the benefit of alerting only those who need to be alerted, and not unnecessarily panicking those who are outside the danger zone.

NTT DoCoMo also announced a few other interesting pieces of mobile phone technology…

Sharp have unveiled a new smartphone, the somewhat oddly-titled Sharp Advanced/W-Zero3. In fact, the smartphone itself seems a bit odd. Looking a bit like a bad cross between a PDA and standard phone, the Advanced/W-Zero3 looks like a typical candybar phone when closed, and has a slide open QWERTY keyboard that turns it into a complete smartphone.

More details after the jump.