Heli Rantavuo Research Site

You can look and you can touch

The display and retail of the mobile phones in Japan is more relaxed than what we are used to at home. The phones are not sold only in shiny, air conditioned, operator-specific shops, but also in street corner kiosks that expand to the street. In these corner shops, a range of handset models and different operators are represented. In all shops, the models are free for the customer to play with at own will, not tucked away under a desk or held in a glass display and tried under the salesman's control. (For a photo, please see my entry from Sept 16th.)

Handset prices

Prices of the handsets vary from O ? to let's say 250 ?. In Japan, as in most countries, handsets are sold in connection to services from a certain operator. The operator buys phones from the manufacturer (Sanyo, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Kyocera...) and subsidizes the price of the handset to the consumer when s/he subscribes to the operator's services. This way, the cheaper models can come free, whereas the newer models with more and fancier functions cost, but still much less than in Finland.

In Finland, selling a product in connection with another, so that the consumer cannot use one without the other ("kytkykauppa"), is illegal. However, right now, Fthe operator Elisa and manufacturer SonyEricsson are companies speaking for change and officials are considering it.

Service prices

The operator services in Japan, in turn, cost more than in Finland. Finnish consumer rights authorities would faint in front of all the possible, very oblique charge combinations.

The very basic framework is that you subscribe to a set monthly price plan, with my operator Vodafone varying from ca. 35 ? to 170 ? per month (there are eight options). This is what you pay whether you use the phone or not. A part of the monthly fee includes call and data services. Once you exceed that amount, you pay it on top of your monthly fee. For example, out of my 35? contract ca. 20? includes calls, e-mail, and other services. If I call and e-mail more than 20 ?, I pay extra. If don't use all of the 20 ?, it's my loss, I pay the 35? anyway.

The picture is blurred by a number of different bonuses, discounts, and additional charges for example when switching to another price plan, handset, or unsubscribing. (Just check out one of the operator's pages, operator names at the end.) You need to have a residence permit to Japan in order to open a subscription. Except a prepaid one, but they are expensive. (I got my subscription with the kind help of a colleague.)

Call costs vary, with my operator, from 10 to 60 yen per minute (ca. 8 cents to 45 cents) depending on the subscription type. The only cheap time of day is between 1am and 7pm, i.e. useless really. My cost, about 30 yen per minute, is a common price. Data services, on the other hand, are cheap: from 2yen to 8yen (1,5 to 6 cents) per message - the price of multimedia messages in Finland is five times as high, about 40 cents.

Services and functions

It is my understanding so far that in Japan, people do mostly use e-mail and other services rather than speak on the phone. Photos taken with the mobile phone camera are sent as attachments to e-mails, not as separate messages. Other services would mean games, tv, radio, video-conferencing, web content.

Tv and radio are free, as the handsets receive the broadcast directly. It is additional operator services (more data transfer, for example) and downloads that you need to pay extra or even subscribe separately for.

The functions on the phone are abundant. It serves, as is familiar from Finnish phones, as clock, alarm clock, calendar, calculator (in Japan, they have a special split costs among friends-setting for it but no currency settings as we do), memo book, but also as fortuneteller and animation composer. Also, you can set animation on your display and the characters will address you by name. In your reminders-list, you can stamp your reminders using 30 different options as the usual date, birthday, and dinner to "drive", "unlucky", "tv", "hospital visit", and reason for a reminder in Japan, "holiday".

Designs

There are only a few exceptions from the clamshell-type design available. One is Nokia 6650, and the only Japanese one I've seen, by Au (operator KDDI brand) and manufacturer Sanyo, at first looks a bit cheap. But after going through twenty clumsy, thick clamshells that all look more or less the same, this model becomes quite attractive. It's very thin but quite tall so it seems a bit impractical, but it is retro design here so that comes with the deal I suppose.

Some camera phones indeed look very much like cameras (in the middle row.)

Finnish teens refresh their phone designs with nail polish, but here, they have more advanced ways to do that. One is to buy the equivalent of keyrings to hang from your phone, varying from hello kitty toys to jewelry. Another is mobile phone tattoos, sold by a young Korean man in Akihabara. Both I'd like to see exported to Finland.

Usability and other problematics

As can be guessed from the variety of services and functions of these phones, usability is poor. After having my phone for less than a week, I have gone through sound settings so many times I cannot even remember to get them the way I want, and still I'm not sure whether that is the case. There are also functions I have no idea what they mean, like "close mode", or that are difficult to work out, like "manner mode" (this of course has to do with translation too.) There are many overlapping menus and also functions especially in sounds. After going through all the settings the first time to customise my phone and services, I felt I'd never be able to remember where to change a setting in case I would want to.

I was overjoyed with the e-mail service, as long as it turned out that after all, I cannot communicate to my Finnish e-mail friends with it. My photos get lost on the way and I can't see their e-mails at all. Oh well. Have to get a lot of Japanese friends to write to.

As pointed out by some of my colleagues, the input method by the user is inconvenient. I find Nokia SMS input irritating, but indeed writing with my Toshiba is even worse. My colleagues also criticize the tendency to push more and more operations and content to the mobile phone and consequently small screen. They also explanined that this tendency, and the popularity of the ketai is because of low pc use in Japan (compared to what we are used to.) For many young people thei mobile phone is the first and only computer they use.

I have a very boring, one of the most basic Nokia phones, but I'm already looking forward to going back to it. I will miss the little ku-man character on my display addressing me as Heli (although, with my Japanese, as far as I know she might be insulting me), listening to radio in the morning (well, at home I have a "real" one), and showing off the tv in my phone (I don't watch it myself here, but I might at home.) Perhaps I will after all become an enthousiastic 3G customer once I return to Finland - if it really finally works then.

All Japanese operators have English pages with good pictures of their models. The operators I am aware of are NTTDoCoMo, KDDI, and Vodafone.