TheFeature :: It's All About The Mobile Internet

Foreigner's Phone: The Internet in My Pocket
By Justin Hall, Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 GMT 2001

What's it like for a Luddite to dive into the wireless wonderland that Tokyo has now become?

My first few days in Tokyo I was in a social coma. Harajuku art parties, small Tibetan bars, business meetings at DoCoMo, everywhere I could see people talking but I wasn't able to communicate back. I was in the most wired city in the world, and I was wireless.

Actually, it was the other way around. Everyone around me was wireless, online all the time, and I was wired, still checking my email on my laptop back in my apartment. Twelve year olds in Tokyo use email on their mobile phones. People here make a custom of exchanging meishi, or name cards. Many cards have a mobile phone email address on them. Early in the evening, if you get the right card, and you have the right phone, you will be swept into a constant flurry of short emails coordinating parties and dinners, and sometimes taking the place of them.

As much as I was looking forward to this wondrous wireless socializing, I thought I might have a chance to leapfrog into a full-motion future. October 1st, NTT DoCoMo became the first mobile phone provider in the world to offer 3G mobile phone services, what they've dubbed "FOMA" for "Freedom Of Mobile multimedia Access." While FOMA doesn't necessarily mean you will have more friends, or deeper conversations, it does mean that short videos might take the place of simple short emails.

NTT DoCoMo

I arrived in Tokyo on October 2nd, and reportedly I was the first foreign journalist to show up at DoCoMo for a videophone demo. Takumi Suzuki, a clean young man with just a bit more English than my Japanese, he was excited to dial me up with one unit and take the other unit out for a virtual guided tour of the expansive DoCoMo lobby.

Normally you can see the Imperial Palace from where DoCoMo sits, through this videophone, I could see an indistinct light. Later, I would be wandering around Azabu-Juban late at night, looking for a Coke machine that accepted payment by i-mode. Having a video phone might have allowed me to call my friend Kenji Eno and have him tell me where I was and which way to turn to find his new vending wonder.

Impressed by the phone, I was hoping that one of the other five thousand first-run users might actually be someone I wanted to look at while talking with. But Suzuki-san informed me that an even newer standard of FOMA phones would be released in December, phones with new software that would run high-bandwidth specific applications. What about this first generation of phones? They can't be upgraded. Here I was facing three months on the cutting edge, and then relative obsolescence. Expensive, hard to find, and aging fast - if I was still interested, there was still one hurdle. DoCoMo won't provide service to just anyone - you have to be a resident of Japan.

So while I wait weeks for my journalist visa to clear, I'm consigned to the ranks of the ordinary Japanese mobile phone shopper. I turned to the overcast neon-lit streets of Akihabara to consider my options. From dimly lit aisle shops staffed by one toothless man on a stool, to fluorescent pulsating electronics malls echoing the tinny din of singsong promotional female voices, there's a store in Akihabara that has every piece of gadgetry old and new.

Mobile phones are no different. Each store seems to sellthem, alongside computerized garden hose automation systems, or high definition televisions.

Link your style

Before I came to Japan, I heard so much about DoCoMo; they lead ordinary citizens to the wireless web through shrewd marketing and an innovative value chain. But J-Phone, as it turns out, was the first mobile phone provider in the world to offer a color screen, and mobile phone-to-internet email. And the first mobile phone provider to put a camera in a mobile phone.

Why bother? Even one year after it was released, the camera-phone pictures are grainy and muddy, and much too small. But the idea that you could take a picture and immediately send it to someone else has serious mojo. "Look - this is where I am right now!" If I couldn't be in the 3G future of full-motion video, I might as well start with the still picture era.

The J-Phone October catalog was inspiring. An attractive girl in a mild colored mohawk, a refugee from the 1980s with some colorful funk style, holds a camera phone brushing up against her cheek. Her expression and posture says: "Come on, see if you can keep up with my tribe." J-Phone won my business; I opted for Toshiba's J-T06, with a built-in camera. The phone itself cost about $175 retail; Takeshi Natsuno, Managing Director of i-mode strategyat DoCoMo, took one look at my phone and announced that it probably cost$1000 to make. J-Phone replied - "it is commercialconfidence."

Immediately in front of the cash registerwhere I purchased my phone was a dizzyingarray of blinking, strobing mobile phone antennae upgrades.Eager to personalize, I paid $30 for a blue antenna. It's quitediscreet until I receive a phone call or short mail and my phonebecomes an alien landing beacon, a mini-disco ball of blue LEDcolor.

Now I can ride the crowded subways in Japan, a one-manpeer-to-peer publisher, taking pictures of the sleeping commutersaround me, and emailing them to friends around the world. My phonemakes a little noise "I see you!" it says, before a simulatedshutter sound plays off a microchip. That's supposed to keep perverts from taking naughty pictures I suppose; fortunately the trainis loud enough that people don't catch me.

My desk-boundfriends can reply to my mobile phone mail, and I can pleasantly read through their long email messages. While I fret in advance over thenecessary brevity of my reply, daily thumb exercises are increasing mytyping speed.

Email on the road is a definite improvement: nowevery time I leave the house, I carry a little bit of the internet inmy pocket. And I'm happy to see you!

I see you!