A couple of things:
- There ARE antennaes in Tokyo subway stations. I know for a fact that
Vodafone had 100% coverage for 2G, and nearly that for 3G almost two years
ago. I believe that au and DoCoMo also have coverage. Just because there are
all sorts saying 'don't talk on the train' doesn't mean you can't talk on
the platform, and in fact it is a very popular thing to do: "Honey, I will
be home at 2 am, drunk as a skunk and frisky, so..." Subway tunnels are a
different matter. Until the preference for deathly silence of 100 sardines,
uhmm, I mean commuters, packed into a square metre is swapped for the
annoying sound of human speech, there isn't much to be done. The BS about
pacemakers ruins it for people who just want to send e-mails. Actually,
mini-cells aren't very expensive, so I am guessing it is just Tokyo Metro
trying to squeeze more out of the carriers.
- SMS message cost nowhere near 100 yen. In fact, as a couple of
others have noted, the line in Japan between SMS and e-mail is very blurred,
especially on Nokia or other foreign handsets, so that if you send a mail,
for example, from a Softbank phone that is to a phone number outside of
Japan, it gets sent as SMS if the gateway recognises the number, which is
the case with it's roaming partners. That is because with 3G, they use
standard SMS infrastructure and handset clients to do e-mail. Depending on
the data price plan you are on, a short message will cost you 5 yen or less.
- DoCoMo and Softbank use sim cards in their 3G phones, but I am
reasonably certain that au do not, unless they have started doing that in
the last several months. Older DoCoMo sims didn't allow use in a GSM phone,
but newer ones do, I believe. You used to have to ask for a 'blue sim' if
you wanted to roam overseas.
- I agree with Andrew that it is great to just send a text to
someone's mobile phone number. But the lack of that functionality in Japan
is not a result of backwardness, but the opposite: Because the closed SMS
system was fairly quickly opened to e-mail, something that most European and
American operators still haven't done, one of the unfortunate downsides was
spam, and as noted above, phone numbers were too easy to guess, and so they
went. There may be a lesson there, which is that closed systems have their
advantages. But tell that to the majority of Japanese whose main e-mail
address is their mobile. There are ways that phones can exchange such
information by IRDA, and clever people actually use that to exchange mobile
e-mail addresses, but it is true that texting someone you don't know is not
possible to do reliably in Japan.
Best,
Nik
On 7/19/07, Iqbal Abdullah <iqbalabd_yj@yahoo.co.jp> wrote:
>
> Still on the SMS thread, with that kind of pricing, are
> there many people using the SMS service in the first
> place? I've goggled, but seems that Softbank haven't
> release those numbers.
>
> --- "Arnold P. Siboro" <asiboro@maltech.jp> wrote:
>
> >
> > OK perhaps I was just unfortunate, and I already
> > stopped using Japanese
> > mobile phones for sms long time ago due to the
> > punitive pricing (100yen
> > per sms??) and use my foreign phone and SIM, as well
> > as PC based sms
> > (such as www.smsdiscount.com, and even Skype Out
> > does SMS cheaply).
> >
> > Pada Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:53:17 +0900
> > si Kyle Barrow <kyle@pukupi.com> bilang:
> >
> > > I send and receive SMS from overseas all the time
> > on both a Japanese
> > > and Nokia Softbank mobile. Lost SMS is very rare
> > even from
> > > infrastructurally challenged locations.
> > >
> > > Kyle
> > >
> >
> >
> > Arnold P. Siboro (asiboro@maltech.jp)
> >
> > "I think there is a world market for maybe five
> > computers."
> > - Thomas Watson, chairman of
> > IBM, 1943
> >
> >
> > This mail was sent to address
> > iqbalabd_yj@yahoo.co.jp
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> >
> >
>
>
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>
Received on Fri Jul 20 01:22:36 2007