—My first cell phone—
Price: Free
Features: “call”
—My second cell phone—
Price: appx $360, reduced with plan purchase
Features: call, text, pic, pic message, video, video message, tetris (sold seperately $6.00), heavily drm protected mp3 player 6 song max no headphone play no play while phone is closed
—My third cell phone—
Price: appx $160
Features: call, text, pic, pic message, video
===Japanese cell phone===
Price: ???
Features: ???
New Cell Phone Email: everyonesmiles@softbank.ne.jp –you should email or text me on it!
The first cell phone that I ever received was a hand me down from my mom. This occured somewhere during my time in highschool, (高校の時） and I was pretty ecstatic!
I’m sorry, that was a lie, and now I feel really bad for misleading you. Let me set the books straight.
I was completely nonplussed at my new phone because this is what it could do: nothing. …And it even did THAT poorly as I recall! The only feature was some cryptic “call” function. I mean seriously, when is the last time that you actually “placed” a “call” as I think they say it. Nobody even uses that! And, being the adolescent highschool freshman that I was, I was ACUTELY aware of what everyone else did and did not do. And I was even more keenly aware that my phone happened to have one unimportant function and no important ones. (Such as the ‘make me really popular’ function or the ‘have girls look at me’ function. I would have even settled for the ‘texting’ function, but alas none were forthcoming from that grey piece of junk)
Now my parents, being the caring, coddling people that they are, eventually realized that their son stood out a little from all the other children. He was maybe just a little slower than the rest; a little ’special.’ They knew that only they could step in and save their child; only they could give him the one opportunity to make something of himself in this world, so they bought me a shiny new cell phone!
As a graduation present.
Ok, let me just put this in perspective here. I had the phone for maybe 3 weeks before the end of my senior year. How many times during those three weeks did I use special functions such as ‘text’ ‘picture’ ‘picture message’ ‘mp3 player’ ‘video’ and certainly not least important ‘tetris’? The answer is about 50 billion. Times 2. That is 100 billion times special features were used. How many times did I use those same wondrous functions once I got into college? Maybe 5. Minus 2. That is 4 whopping times! Not three because tetris broke before I got into college and I counted all the times that I REALLY wanted to play it as one time because I didn’t want anyone to accuse me of padding the numbers. My point here is, all of the ‘cool’ factor of functions like that evaporated like values in Vegas. Nobody cared anymore…
So when that phone’s battery started to go caput 2 years later, (not just started, it was only staying on for like 4 minutes) my parents bought me a shiny new cell phone! But this one was only shiny, and had no sweet functions. I say ‘no’ sweet functions because these days ‘picture’ ‘video’ and ‘text’ seem as old as dirt. Just the fact that a phone that I bought 2 years later had LESS features than my previous one was quite a feat!
All this to come to one focus: yesterday I finally bought myself a Japanese cell phone. I wish to do a short and hopefully quite revealing case study concerning one man’s (my) four cell phones.
Now, let us review the stats of each phone once again. And to make sure that you read it again and don’t just skim over, I have included a new ‘comments’ section for each phone. FYI I already had the comments when I wrote it the first time, I just withheld details. Morally questionable? Up to you, but I’m in Japan so I don’t have to listen to your complaints.
—My first cell phone—
Price: Free
Features: “call”
Comments: Grey and stupid. Especially when sand got in the speaker phone and made it sound like mom was an alien.
—My second cell phone—
Price: appx $360, reduced with plan purchase
Features: call, text, pic, pic message, video, video message, tetris (sold seperately $6.00), heavily drm protected mp3 player 6 song max no headphone play no play while phone is closed
Comments: AWESOME. For a highschooler at least, when you stand to be more awesome than you could ever be at any other time in life. mp3 player was really troublesome. never used it after i tried to upload some songs and it didn’t really work well.
—My third cell phone—
Price: appx $160
Features: call, text, pic, pic message, video
Comments: Functional. Spartan.
===Japanese cell phone===
Price: ???
Features: ???
Comments: ??? (so pissed)
This is how I purchased my Japanese cell phone. First, I asked my friend Kris how to get one. He said go to Softbank. It is the best. So on my way home one day, I stopped by the Softbank shop.
Me: “Eigo wo hanasemasuka?” (Do you speak English?)
Dude: “Sore ha chotto…” (That is a little….) …basically means NO.
Me: “Dareka imasuka?” (Is there SOMEONE who can?)
Dude: “Aa, gomennasai, inaindesuga…” (Oh I am sorry, it is just that there isn’t one but…) …NO
Me: “Tabun daijoubudesukara, puripeido keitai ga arimasuka?” (Maybe that is ok, are there prepaid cellphones here?)
Dude: “blablablablablablablablablablablablablablablablablabla” (lots of stuff I didn’t understand with much apologizing mixed in, then he showed me a list of participating convenience stores and told me to go to one)
I knew that he had the wrong idea. The convenience stores are where they sell prepaid CARDS to put into a prepaid cell phone that you have already purchased. Even so, I could tell that he was right they didn’t have prepaid cell phones there.
Next day I left for Nagoya, and on the last day I was going to go with Naoki to get one. However, I needed my passport which I hadn’t brought since I have an alien registration card now. Go figure.
I come back and just ask my homestay mom. She says, all the stores in Shinjuku speak english! So I decide to go to the softbank store in Shinjuku, starting with the biggest store – “BikuKamera” which sells all brands of phones. I go inside to the cell phone section, no one speaks english, but a guy gives me a map to another Softbank store REALLY far away. So instead I visit a couple more softbank stores in the area. No english. No english. No prepaid cell phones. Finally, I give up and find my way (eventually) to the store on the map, a tiny tiny little softbank store in the basement of a building.
Me: “Eigo wo hanasemasuka?” (speak english?)
Cute girl: “Ano, sore ha chotto…” (umm that is a little…)
Me: “Yappari sou….” (yeah, I thought not.)
Me: “Tabun daijoubu. Puripeido Keitai ga arimasuka?” (its prolly fine, any prepaids here?)
Cute girl: “Aa hai! Arimasu!” (THEY HAD SOMEEEEEEEEEEEEEE)
Next two hours: “blablablablablablablablablablablablablablabla”
It was a good thing that I met a really patient and kindof cute girl working there or those two hours would have been HELL. Turns out they needed to call my host family and get their permission to use the address, amongst other completely unexpected roadblocks. During the process, the girl found a translation website on her computer and was translating things to english then writing them on a whiteboard for me to look at. Most of them made absolutely no sense like: “it is a little back.” “What is?” “registration back is a little.” “Oh ok, now it makes perfect sense.”
Mostly we just laughed though, and that made it ok, even though her coworkers were staring at us the whole time (there was a strange lull in customers while I was buying it….. hmm) Afterwards, she called the number for me and helped me to set all the right settings and so forth. Afterwards I said “Otsukaresamadeshita” (Thank you for the effort on my behalf!) Which made us chuckle.
Last night I investigated some of the features on my new Japanese phone which include:
call, text, pic, pic message, video, video message, VIDEO PHONE CALL (the camera rotates so that it faces out of the phone or in towards your face), preloaded music, preloaded ridiculous japanese games where you can like adopt a pet dog and have to take care of it amongst other games, a fully functional itunes knockoff allowing me to upload any of my current library to the phone and listen on the included headphones, around 2 gigs of hardrive space with no sd card yet, internet, email, (keep in mind that I have no plan, yet texting and emailing are still free and unlimited), endless absurd menu options (like having someone riding on a bike and the menu choices being the balloons he is holding), on board english dictionary, rudimentory translator, handy phrase book with accompanying video (like you walk into a store and then have options of what you want to say and it tells you what they are in english), and a data converter, and other less important options.
Keeping in mind that my two American Cell phones were $360, $160 respectively, how much do you think this phone cost?
….
$50.
I’m sorry let me just write that again.
$50.
This is probably the worst phone that Japan has to offer. and I’m afraid it beats the pants off of my $360 american phone. Yeah, I don’t want to know what values they had to cut corners on to put this phone in my hands for $50. I won’t ask. I will just put in my headphones, turn up the music, and text some bro. Like Uncle Dave in California.
.
