Fall Roundup of Hot Topics: Packet Fees, WLAN, and 3G Roaming
A couple of interesting events took place in Tokyo last Friday. The American Chamber of Commerce hosted their Fourth Annual E-Business Summit, while Credit Suisse First Boston’s lead telecoms analyst Mark Berman conducted a 3G/Wireless Internet Conference. Some interesting points came out of both. Afterwards, Kobe University’s Jeff Funk commented that the predicted fall in 3G packet prices is “interesting,” while Matsumoto’s additional arguments — that the US is a car society and thus Japan’s experience isn’t relevant — was not valid since “SMS is doing well in Europe and DoCoMo claim that i-mode revenues per person are independent of the region in Japan.”
There’s been endless yakking about cultural differences between Japanese and US keitai users. Which features appeal to which culture? Is wireless Internet important for Americans? Those Japanese will pay for data, won’t they? Yada yada yada… We’ve heard comments ad nauseam about the differences between Americans, Europeans, and Japanese when it comes to choosing cell phones. While we have long disbelieved the odious stereotypes — like “Japanese want to pay for Internet access” and “American thumbs are too big for those tiny i-mode keypads” — we have to admit, we weren’t sure what to believe ourselves. WWJ gets to the heart of the matter with a visit to Cellular Plaza Mims, a unique cell phone shop serving large numbers of true-blue Americans here in Japan. 
Takaharu Mita is just a regular guy with a DoCoMo 3G videophone — but like many early-adopters, he’s got no one with whom to hold video calls. In March, he posted his number on his “FOMA Diary” Web site and invited the world to call — anytime. Well, the world responded, and Mita-san has got a lot to say about videophones, Big D, and how society’s gonna change…
We interview Roy Tseng, a Tokyo resident, Web developer, and long-time keitai enthusiast about the good, the bad, and the cool on Japanese cell phones.