Not sure how many people here have tried a PDA with a thumb keyboard,
but I find it makes all the difference for text input in either English
or Japanese (I have a Sony Clie PEG-UX50). I would think a Treo
650-type device in Japan could be pretty popular; should we attribute
the lack of one to carriers' unwillingness to introduce more expensive
handsets, or the received wisdom that phones need to be kept at the
level of consumer electronics devices and not allowed to develop a
level of complexity that would supposedly alienate users? The fact that
DoCoMo is working with Motorola to make enterprise-targeted "PDA-type
phones" argues against that generalization.
Incidentally, I hear that the president of a certain Western cellphone
company recently advanced the opinion that the UK is two years behind
Japan for handsets...which doesn't necessarily gel with opinions
expressed here recently :)
On 2005/02/17, at 17:05, Arnold P. Siboro wrote:
>
> Picking up just the PDA (un)popularity part, if you know how to write
> Japanese, you'll know that jotting down Japanese notes on PDA is pain
> in
> the ass. I myself experienced that PDA is quite useless when it comes
> to
> writing notes. For other tasks in business scene, I find my au A5407CA
> enough, so I don't carry around my iPaq as often.
>
> Nevertheless, I do envy the smartphones out there, perhaps the underdog
> Vodafone would come up with smartphones for Japanese market??
Received on Thu Feb 17 16:15:39 2005