In room printing service with memory card reader at the Shilla Hotel in Jeju island, South Korea.

Battlefield 1943 :)

This morning the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association announced that for the thirteenth month in a row, Japanese mobile phone shipments declined. Considering how technology driven the Japanese industry is, one may ask why Japanese mobile phone shipments are so low. To put a long story short, Japanese operators have killed the Japanese wireless industry!

In Japan, operators are almighty and you have to comply with thousands of pages of internal specifications to sell them something. For mobile phones, most of the user interface details are already fixed by operators. The problem is that those details have not evolved much for the past ten years. From a user interface viewpoint, there are only minor differences between a Japanese mobile phone from 2009 and one from 2000: more options, more colours, a few animations but still very unfriendly.

Not only those specifications make Japanese mobile phones unsalable outside of Japan but Japanese mobile phone vendors have lost the aptitude to do anything else. This particularity has also protected the Japanese market from outsiders… till the day operators decide to drop their requirements and give the freedom back to vendors. This has already started with Softbank and the iPhone. Isn’t it ironic to see a foreign vendor finally succeeding in Japan partly because it does not have to comply with the requirements Japanese vendors have to.

Let me try to illustrate my point on bad user interface with my own experience with NEC’s flahship for softbank: 930N. On the paper, it’s a fantastic phone: 8.1 megapixel camera with autofocus, HSPA (3G highspeed), GPS, Digital TV, Bluetooth, 580 hours of standby time and only 13.9mm thick for 111g. Unfortunately, the user interface makes it very frustrating to use on a daily basis. Some example of major flaws:

Pictures: if you use a memory card (microSD) to store the photos you take, you cannot edit them. Photos have to be moved to (or stored in) the phone memory to be edited.

Email: 300 Kbytes limit to whatever you send (makes me wonder why shipping the phone with an 8 mega pixels camera in the first place). Impossibility to use a different server (e.g. gmail or yahoo).

Bluetooth: no file transfer possible via bluetooth.

Browsing: pretty much useless for browsing anything else than mobile-tailored Japanese websites (forget about Google maps).

Upload: again the 300 Kbytes limit but enhanced with the impossibility to upload whatever sits on your memory card (and that includes the pictures you took).

Menus: only the top level boasts fancy animated icons. One click drags you down to cryptic lists.

Gallery: no direct access to your pictures, you always have to go through the whole directory structure to access the folder containing them (Data Folder > My Picture > microSD > DCIM > 100NECDT).

Phonebook: no way to directly access a list of your phone book entries, the phonebook starting position is in search mode always.

Boomarks: two kinds of browsers (Yahoo! Ketai and PC Browser) + two memories (phone and microSD) give you 4 different locations for your bookmarks and 4 locations to choose from.

Profiles: only two of them, normal and “manner”.

Text Entry: no space bar when editing messages, the [0] key only serves as a zero. For space, you have to press [left].

Security: too many functions require the security code to be entered. Want to delete more than one photo? Want to change the settings of your podometer? Do not forget your security code.

This phone would be such a winner with a different software. NEC and others, please give Android or Symbian a try!

@ Tokyo Midtown

Clean Energy System by Sanyo. As Gerard Jugnot put it: an electric bike is an interesting alternative between a car and a heart attack ;-)

For the family.

5D Mark II + EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM : impressive :-)

Yodobashi called us before lunch, our gift arrived one month earlier than initially scheduled. Yes!

Not too bad, or at least much better than with an E61!