On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Darren Luckett wrote:
> you could ask that. I them (of which you are a small part) to show a
> little spark of originality - just a 10th of docomos.
I think they showed far more than just a 10th of Docomo's spark of
originality when they forced Docomo to start putting cameras in their
phones.
While I am not particularly impressed by Vodafone in Japan these days,
J-phone in its day was was not a sluggard. Some other points where they
innovated better than Docomo:
o E-mail. Short-mail is now free, and has been for quite some time.
They have long-mail without the silly "split this message up into
eight pieces" that Docomo does. Best of all, you get a (free!) short
mail with the first part of the message, and only download the full
message if you want to see it, so you don't have to pay for spam, or
some huge PC-oriented message that you're not interested in. (Not to
mention how much easier the deletion is--who wants to delete eight
parts individually?)
o Cute characters. I've seen J-phone models that had basically a
little playmate in the phone that would do things like come out
and talk to you from time to time. It may not be something you're
interested in, but a lot of young (and not so young) girls in Japan
are interested in this.
o Better input methods on phones. Why can't docomo phones do things
like remember what I filled in in the last half dozen dialogue boxes
and let me repeat and edit them?
o One-shot billing (instead of subscription billing), which Docomo
*still* doesn't have.
o Pricing: J-phone was for a long time (and may still be) generally
cheaper than Docomo. Especially for voice calls, it's hard not to be.
Other areas where Docomo quite irritates, but I'm not familiar enough
with J-phone to know if they're much better, are voice quality (PDC is I
think the worst voice quality I've ever experienced in a mobile phone)
and coverage on the old network (where my anecdotal experience was that
three years ago J-phone was better--Docomo in the past couple of years
had made massive improvements to their PDC network by adding little
cell-extenders or whatever they are).
When Nick says that J-phone was doing good stuff three or four years
ago, he's not wrong. Maybe they can bring that back, but I wouldn't rate
it likely. I've worked at companies where head-office is in another
country, and it's quite stifling.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Tue Feb 15 04:37:48 2005