Joi Ito's Stuff

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.

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.

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.

My Vonage setup

I blogged about my Vonage service back in May 2003 and I have become totally addicted to it. I am now working at home quite a bit and it has become much more integrated into my home. I have it hooked up to an el-cheepo cordless phone and a Plantronics vista headset. The headset lets me talk while I'm at my computer hands-free and the cordless phone lets me walk around the house.

I've been using Vonage for awhile now and it is as clear as can be on my el-cheepo ADSL service in the backwaters of Chiba. Don't believe any of the carrier FUD about latency or quality of service. It works. So for $.39.99/month, I can call anywhere in North America with unlimited minutes walking around my house in Japan with a cordless phone.

The Vonage Terms of Service say:

1.3.2 Use of Service and Device by Customers Outside the United States: While we encourage use of the Service within the United States to other countries, Vonage does not presently offer or support the Service to customers located in other countries. If you remove the Device to a country other than the United States and use the Service from there, you do so at your own risk, including the risk that such activity violates local laws in the country where you do so. You are liable for any and all use of the Service and/or Device by any person making use of the Service or Device provided to you.

So if you live outside the US (which is the most useful application of this setup), you will have to have an address in the US to buy the Vonage box and you will have to be prepared for your local telephone carrier to come break down your door for the illegal trafficking of bits.

My Nokia 6600 vs my Sony SO505iS

I know this is comparing apples and oranges, but that's what I've got: apples and oranges.

The Nokia 6600 has a 65,536 color 176 x 208 pixel display and a 640 x 480 pixel camera whereas the Sony SO505iS has a 262,144 color 240 x 320 display and a 1280 × 960 pixel camera. Both displays are bright, but the Sony display and camera win.

They're about the same size and weight, but the 6600 feels much more comfortable in my hand. Warm, round and buttons in the right place. The SO505iS is cold and a bit awkward (as if a digital camera and a phone got merged in the machine in "The Fly"). Having said that, the SO505iS is much better than the SO505i that it replaces. It's thinner and generally better designed. (The antenna doesn't stick out of your chin, the camera turns on when you open the camera cover, etc.)

The SO505iS runs J2ME and Flash applications whereas the 6600 runs J2ME and Symbian applications. The UI on the 6600 is utilitarian and simple whereas the Sony sports an animated background and a OS X sort of zooming icon wheel. The Sony has a two speaker stereo system and a stereo mini-plug for headphones where you can listen to music and watch videos from the proprietary memory stick in their proprietary media format. (You can record your favorite TV shows onto your memory stick and watch them on the train.)

The biggest difference is that you have to be a rocket scientist to figure out all of the message and data modes on the 6600. The blessing and the horror of the open system is that 6600 has to deal with all of the carrier inconsistencies and trying to figure out how to get online with the 6600 reminded me of just how screwed up the telco standardization process is. The SO505iS, on the other hand comes from the dictatorship of Docomo so what it lacks in flexibility and openness, it benefits in simplicity. Shoot a photo, click and send. Moblog away. I have yet to be able to send a picture via email from my 6600.

Both phones have lots of applications, but the Symbian applications are impressively Internet aware. There is an IRC client and IM client. Docomo, with it's rather closed architecture regarding networking has some cool applications, but they are really focused on providing content and services.

I would probably have a different opinion if I still used my Vaio, but the SO505iS really doesn't want to have anything to do with my Mac. The 6600 on the other hand, loves my Mac, talking to it in Bluetooth and even happily becoming a gprs modem for it. Zooming in a cab in San Francisco with my 6600 in my pocket and my PowerBook on my lap online was a great feeling. (Thanks for showing me how to do this Rael!)

Having said that, this is a totally useless review because you can't use the 6600 in Japan because we don't have a GSM network and you can't use the SO505iS anywhere outside of Japan because it uses Docomo's proprietary PDC network, or rather Docomo uses the SO505iS. Thus apples and oranges.

Sorry, this is a dupe from my main blog.