Back To The Future

So today was the big day, folks. You can't really claim to live in Japan unless you have a keitai (cell phone), so I guess it's official now. The phone that I originally wanted (the orange one) was so old that they didn't have any paperwork on it, so they couldn't confirm if it had the option of changing the menus to English (although almost all of them did). So I decided to go for the Foma P700i, another low-end phone, offered by DoCoMo. Despite the fact that it only cost me ¥1 (the equivalent of 1¢), it sports the following features: camera, video camera, email, web browser, java games, real-time video chat and probably a million other features I'll never use. I mainly bought it because it was cheap and also because it has a button on the side that makes the phone open up. Now that's a useful innovation.

This is what the box looks like.

I'm pretty sure that all products in Japan need to fulfill a cuteness minimum in order to be sold legally. This little mushroom man may have been packaged with my phone in accordance with such regulations.

This is what the phone looks like when it's closed.

Now the phone is open. You can't tell in this picture, but the background is constantly moving; the bunny hops around, the clouds in the sky move, etc.


I wish I had some way of accurately demonstrating how crisp, clear and detailed the display is. These screenshots of various games don't really do it justice.

The charger is very small.

You can put a mini SD card in here, probably for storing pictures and video.

It came with this free headset but the AC adaptor cost an extra ¥900. Isn't that strange?

Japanese cell phones can scan these bar code things using their cameras and they usually take you to a website where you can buy or download something. This is a book of free background wallpapers that came with the phone. I've also seen these bar codes pop up on screens in arcade games, although I'm not sure what for.

Alexis had heard about this service where DoCoMo will call an English-speaking representative and then you pass the phone back and forth in order to work through the contract and such, so we thought we'd just show up and give it a shot. Well, possibly because I spoke to the woman in Japanese, no such thing happened. Luckily, everything was pretty straightforward and I was able to make sense of most everything she explained to us. A few times she had to pull out the English rate plan guide to explain things I didn't understand. For example, in Japan you don't buy "minutes" like you do in America. Instead, you choose how much you want to pay per month (between about $35 and $170) and depending how much you pay, your rate per minute varies. Even on the lowest plan, you only have to pay like ¥22 a minute, so I didn't see any use in upgrading.