Joi Ito's Stuff

Slide rule on my watch - Seiko Prospex SBDR001

I just bought a Seiko Prospex SBDR001. I bought it mainly for the well integrated digital world clock and the analog watch. It allows you to easily transfer the time from the world clock to the analog watch and the navigation in the world clock is simple. The daylight savings is manual, but I've finally decided after being screwed by daylight saves one too many times that many I should keep my head around it, rather than trying to get my watch to keep track.

This watch has a slide rule. It allows you to multiply, divide, solve simple equations and do conversions very fast. I started fiddling it with it during take-off and landing when you can't use electronic devices and I discovered that I really enjoyed my first experience with a slide rule.

It also explained in the instructions that if you point the little hand at the sun, the point between the 12:00 mark and the little hand is South. (To the left in the morning and to the right in the afternoon.) That makes sense in retrospect, but I didn't know that.

My Nokia 6680

After some begging, Nokia sent me one of their new 6680 phones. (As one of my business partners used to say, "never beg... unless it helps.") Thanks! I'd been trying to get my hands on one because it runs Symbian, is fast, and works on 3G networks. (My old 7600 worked on the Japanese 3G network too, but it wasn't Symbian and was a bit clunky to use.) Since J-Phone/Vodaphone and NTT DoCoMo have rolled out 3G in Japan and have roaming agreements with carriers like T-Mobile, which I use, I've been hoping that I could get a good phone that would finally allow me to have a single phone number everywhere.

So far the phone is great. It's faster than my older Symbian phones, has a application that imports data from your old phone (yay!), has 2 high quality cameras and a logical keypad. (The keypad on my 7610 was a bit too "fashionable".) The main camera has a sliding cover, which I think is a good thing. The only thing I don't like about the design is that it looks a bit like a small Treo.

I just looked at the international coverage information for Japan at it says that the "Voice Rate" is $1.99. I assume this is $1.99 / min. Hmm... Then it says the "Internet Rate" is $1.50. I looked around and haven't been able to figure out what that means. Does that mean $1.50 per packet or something? It's still expensive and I'm not sure if I'll use it much, but at least I know I can. A friend of mine mentioned that if Japan had gone with GSM instead of DoCoMo's funky PDC protocol, Japanese handset manufacturers may have had a better chance competing internationally. As it stands, the foreign markets are dominated by non-Japanese handset companies. Maybe with NTT DoCoMo's announcement that they are going all 3G by the end of the year, we'll see some of the handset guys in Japan start making cooler phones for the global market. On the other hand, I have a feeling that DoCoMo will continue to force the handset guys to cripple their phones. Right now you can't SMS anyone outside of DoCoMo from a DoCoMo phone, even though they are finally using the UMTS standard. According to a friend of mine, this is very difficult to do. You actually have to spend a lot of energy to break the system and limit SMS to your own network.

Here is a matrix comparison of the various Nokia phones. As you can see, only the 6630 and the 6680 do WCDMA 2100 which is the 3G protocol that works in Japan.

The other thing I just noticed is that I was able to navigate bluetooth and the email setup and get all of my data moved over to the new phone in minutes. I thought about how much easier things have gotten, but then I realized that the jargon and the interface were practically the same. I remember only a little while ago when I couldn't make heads or tails of any of this. I was the one who had adapted to the phone. Eek. Lock-in.

Sensaphonics ear molds and my new ProPhonic Soft 2Xs

Last week I received my custom Sensaphonics ear molds for my Shure E5cs and a new set of Senasaphonics ProPhonic Soft 2Xs with custom ear molds. On May 28, the president of Sensaphonics, Michael Santucci, was visiting Japan and he took the molds himself. He was in Tokyo meeting with audiologists training them to take ear molds for Sensaphonics. Michael sent me molds for my Shure E5cs and a new set of ProPhonic Soft 2Xs.

As I've described in my posts about my E2cs, my E5cs and my post about hearing conservation, the idea of in ear isolation ear phones is that you isolate your ear from outside side and increase the quality of the sound while being able to listen to the music at a much lower and less damaging volume. It's a totally different technology than noise canceling. I've tried many types of noise canceling headphones, and if you can afford them and can deal with the weird sensation of having something stuck deep in you ear, the sound with in ear isolation ear phones is MUCH better.

Anyway, I started with the E2cs and declared them "the best headphones I've ever used." Then when the E5cs came out with the dual inducer + cross over it improved the range and quality so much, I declared "I'm in sound heaven." Now I struggle for a new phrase. It's like fine wines or teas. You think you've had the best, and then you're surprised when the next level is even more amazing. Like fine wines and teas, the price keeps getting steeper. The E2cs will set you back $100, the E5cs $500, the ProPhonics 2Xs $900 and the custom ear molds cost about $50. These prices may vary depending on where you get them. (Thanks again Michael for letting me try these out.)

I must say, that the quality of sound increase from the E2cs to the E5cs was much more noticeable than from the E5cs to the ProPhonics. The biggest improvement is the comfort of the soft silicon ear molds. They are amazingly comfortable and shut out the outside sound much better than any of the sleeves available. I had been using the triple flange sleeves for the E5cs because they went the deepest, but they were uncomfortable and I had to keep pushing them in. The silicon ear molds just fit.

Michael has used a very thing, but very strong teflon cable for the ProPhonics so the whole package is much lighter and less visible than the E5cs. In addition, because the molds for the E5cs have to wrap themselves around the E5c casings, the whole thing sticks out of your ear, whereas the ProPhonics inducers fit inside of the mold itself and everything is hidden in your ear, making the whole setup almost invisible. (Not always a good thing if someone is trying to talk to you.)

For a more thorough review an comparison of the ProPhonics with ER-4s and E5cs see:
REVIEW: Sensaphonics ProPhonic 2X-S - Comparison w/ ER-4 and E5c

My new Nokia 7610

I've been playing with my new Nokia 7610 for a few days. What I like about it is that it's running the Series 60 Symbian platform which I like very much because it runs a lot of cool applications and I like the interface. (Or have gotten used to it at least.) It's much faster than the 6600 so it feels comfortable.

The phone looks a bit "over-designed". I don't know if the curvy keyboard or the funny picture on the back are really necessary. For me, they are extraneous.

I like the weight, size and key click response. I am also glad there is a memory card which the 7600 lacks.

All in all, I wish they had kept the shape and size the same as the 6600 and just made the camera better and the system faster.

Now I have to buy a PC so I can try out Lifeblog.

My new Nokia 7600

I bought a Nokia 7600. It's kind of a cool design, but the keys are not in a 10-key layout so it will take a bit of getting used to. You need to use the headphones if you don't want to look like a side talker, but the headphones are pretty cool. It isn't Symbian so I can't run my favorite applications on it. Having said that, it is refreshingly faster than the Nokia 6600. I tried the bluetooth gprs and it worked fine with my Mac. Unfortunately, there isn't a Mac profile for the phone yet so I can't seem to get it to sync with the address book. The main reason I bought this phone is because it does GSM as well as WCDMA. J-Phone/Vodaphone have rolled out WCDMA in Japan so I can use the phone in Japan. We don't have GSM so this is really the only way you can use GMS SIM cards in Japan.

Honda FR750 Tiller

I recently purchased a Honda FR750 Tiller. It's got a 6.5 hp engine and it does an amazing job at... tilling. There is a large section of yard that was all covered in weeds and was taking ages to work on by hand. I sprung for a tiller and in one day, my dandelion hell was over. Or at least the beginning of the end was over. There's nothing like a bunch of flying dandelion seeds to put a damper on neighborhood relations. The tiller is a bit of an overkill for just decimating dandelions, but we're going to start a vegetable garden so I'm sure it will come in handy then.

There's nothing like a trip to the hardware store and a day with a tiller to make you feel like a man. ;-p

IM and IRC for my phone

I have a great Instant Messenger client Agile Messenger and an IRC client WirelessIRC which keeps me in touch with everyone on my Nokia 6600.

WiSIP WiFi SIP Phone

I finally got my WiSIP WiFi SIP Phone from pulverInnovations. It's the first WiFi SIP phone that I've seen. Someone on #joiito told me about it, but now I forget who. Anyway I got one.

Basically, the idea is that anywhere there is a WiFi, you should be able to call anyone you can access via SIP. Just like a cell phone. Except... for free.

It's a bit "prototypey" but it seems to work... Although I don't have anyone to test actual calls with. It comes with a Free World Dialup number, but I don't have any friend who use SIP. I heard that they are currently working on a deal with Vonage, which will let you receive your normal phone calls on it, but I'd rather have everyone using SIP. I got a few other friends to order them so I'll let you know how it works when I have someone to call. ;-)

My new P900i

I just got my P900i. It is an NTT DoCoMo phone made by Panasonic that works on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA 3G network. The coverage of the FOMA network has increased slowly, but their phone designs have been pretty crappy and overall the uptake of the FOMA phones was not very good.

From this series, they took the design/marketing away from the older FOMA team and the hipper and more successful i-mode team was in charge. I think this is the first FOMA phone that I might actually be able to use.

Feature-wise, it's a 1.28 mega-pixel camera pointing out and a 100K pixel camera pointing at you. The camera has auto-focus, so no more of this "macro" stuff. Which is good since the camera has OCR to scan email addresses and phone numbers as well as a bar code reader. There's a bit of politics around the barcodes, but I'll talk about that some other time. It takes MP4 movies and has a mini SD slot.

It has a 240 x 320 TFT display on the inside and a color 96 x 64 STN display on the outside.

Theoretically, it goes 384K and the i-mode browsing and email are noticeably faster. It has a bunch of other new features like multi-tasking, being able to download TV shows at home and watch them on the go, replaceable covers for the "customized look". It has Flash and Java and comes with Final Fantasy built in.

I was able to move my number from the DoCoMo PDC network to this new phone and have it configured to allow me to switch back to my PDC network and my old phone when I don't have FOMA coverage, but this is a clunky solution. It has a button to flip open the flip phone face, but it opens kind of sloooow. It's a bit "boxy" looking too.

Anyway, it's miles better than any FOMA phone I've ever had, but it don't love it like I love my Nokia 6600's. I haven't gotten the camera to work with the moblog yet, but the auto-focus might end up being a cool feature.

Air-H and DDI-Pocket PRIN service

In Tokyo, I use this NEC Air-H AH-N401C. It's a little CF card that fits into a PCMCIA adapter so it works in my 15" PowerBook. There are also a USB Air-H device from Fujitsu which I used on my 12". The Air-H service uses the DDI-Pocket PHS Network. The PHS network was originally a micro-cell phone technology developed at NTT. The idea was that your land line phone would use PHS inside your house as a sort of cordless phone technology, but you would be able to walk out of your house and it would work as a mobile phone. The public phones which had 64K ISDN lines would be turned into cells. This was very nifty idea in densely populated Tokyo, but in the scuffle of breaking up NTT into regional local loop carriers, wireless Docomo, the long distance business and the holding company, the technology fell through the cracks and into a niche. They could set up a wireless network, but it was not to be allowed to be an extension of land line phones. doh... oh and it should try not to compete too much with Docomo's core voice business. PHS ended up becoming the poor person's alternative to the traditional cell phone.

The niche where it ended up doing well was in was data services. The hand-offs became better, they figured out a way for you to pick up two base stations and get 128K instead of 64K. They wired up the subways and buildings. They made the drivers better so that between cells, instead of dropping the connection, it would hold you over and hand it back to you when you got back in range. I am able to get pretty decent connectivity on trains and on highways and can travel hours sometimes without losing my connection.

I used to use NTT's P-in network, but I switched to DD-Pocket because they have better coverage. The competition has helped both the pricing and the coverage I think. Both networks have a Internet service so you can get (almost) flat fee Internet connectivity.

It costs 4950 JPY / month for the heavy user plan. This gives you 25 hours free and 10 JPY / min over 25 hours / month for the IP connectivity and 5 JPY / min with a cap of 1500 / month for the data connection. So if you use it for 25 hours, that's something like 12,450 / month. Today's exchange rate is 106.18 JPY / USD so that's like 117.25 USD / month. So that's about the price of a nice musk mellon. How much would a similar plan be in the US and Europe? Hmm...

I'm not going to explain all of the different Japanese networks in this entry, but we don't have GSM in Japan and instead we have a bunch of proprietary networks except for CDMA, which is an international standard.