Far be it from me to tell RIM their business — I bought some of their stock back when it was trading below $75 CAD and haven’t looked back — but their latest handset, the Pearl Flip 8220 announced this week at CTIA, is a bit of a head-scratcher…

Don’t get me wrong here, I think this is a far more attractive handset than the original candybar Pearl, and had I trialled this little number instead of my fugly 8700 I might have stuck it out with RIM just a little longer. I think a clamshell BlackBerry is a stroke of genius and I expect it will sell like gangbusters in North America and would humble even the mighty iPhone in Japan.

If you didn’t already know this the Japanese mobile market is clamshell-crazy — by my entirely unscientific calculations flip phones outsell all other form factors by about a bajillion to one. The folks at RIM have even included a loop on their first flip for a keitai charm, pointed out in the graphic above.

But there’s one bewildering problem: The Pearl Flip doesn’t do 3G.

The BB Bold, which is already available in Canada (suck it, rest of the world!) has tri-band 3G, so I would have expected subsequent models to follow suit. Instead, our Japanese friends are falling over themselves to witness a DoCoMo variant same fugly 8700 that I threw to the ground in disgust before abandoning it.

I suppose the SureType keypad might also not translate so well for Japanese character input, but in all other respects I bet Japan would flip over this latest RIM job.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go turn myself in to the pun police…

A typical Japanese handset

Kudos to the dedicated reporters at AppleInsider for their recent fluff piece, proudly proclaiming that the new iPhone 3G rocks the Japanese smartphone market.

Here’s the synopsis of this fine bit of reportage:

Mobile providers in Japan are crediting the launch of Apple’s iPhone 3G with dramatically shifting large numbers of subscribers between providers.

Such a bold statement would have you believe that Japanese handset makers are simultaneously committing seppuku at the arrival of the JeebusPhone on their native soil. There’s just one little problem here: While not technically incorrect, AppleInsider’s premise is far more truthiness than truth.

Following the first external link leads to a story about KDDI losing subscribers to rival carrier SoftBank because of the iPhone. The page also states that SoftBank currently boasts more than double the subscribers of the mighty DoCoMo — a bit hard to believe, given that DoCoMo reached the impressive milestone of 50 million subscribers back in 2005. In fact, the company experienced a 41% growth in profits for Q1 2008, and continues to lead the world in revenue from mobile data.

AppleInsider then proceeds to list Japan-specific handset features like “QC Codes” (actually QR) and the “impractical” 1seg broadcast video service. Impractical or not, 1seg is actually quite popular in Japan, and 20 million handsets supporting the free service have been sold there.

And finally, there’s this little chesnut:

“Just the interface itself is enough reason for me to buy the iPhone,” said Andrew Shuttleworth in a Macworld story exploring the iPhone’s potential in the Japanese market.

Good for you, Andrew Shuttleworth! I guess the fact that, (1) you shill for MacWorld and (2) you speak and read English, just like the owner of the only iPhone I actually saw in the wild when I was in Japan last month, doesn’t give you any kind of bias on such matters?

While I can’t fault AppleInsider for telling zombie Mac fanboys exactly what they want to hear, I can tell you from firsthand experience that rumours of the iPhone supplanting the most advanced mobile phone market in the world have been greatly exaggerated…

Hatch-chan DVDs

At first glance the two official DVD releases of Hatch-chan the blogging cat seem little more than a shrewd cash-grab by two pet owners and aspiring internet-preneurs. But repeated viewings of these cultural curiosities reveal a nothing short of a cinematic meisterwerk and damning condemnation of our society’s slide into the abyss of rampant consumerism.

And I should know, because I’m a film school graduate. So there.

Volume 1 of Hatch-chan, The Movie — IMDb reference unavailable, for some reason — Hatch-chan assumes the role of rampant consumer, flying over the Tokyo skyline while poised to squeeze out a giant cat turd on one of the world’s most populous cities… Talk about a carbon footprint!

As the film progresses we see Hatch-chan deconstruct the very notion of consumerism itself. As our feline protagonist endures an endless barrage of ribbon and tape the message is clear: The shiny gift wrapping that we tear through reveals nought but an empty, vapid experience within. Or to put it another way: Why spend money on a gift when they’re just going to play with the box?

In Hatch-chan 2, Electric Boogaloo — I don’t read Japanese but I assume that’s the title — our fallen hero shows us firsthand the trappings of celebrity, wandering the echoey halls of his cardboard cat castle alone.

The filmmakers’ knowledge of cinema history is also on display here, with a clever nod to the famous finale of Orson Welles’ Lady from Shanghai. And with a simple addition of a fish-eye lens the grotesque dystopia of Hatch-chan’s high-rise home becomes all too apparent, and almost too much to bare.

At roughly the equivalent of $20 CAD each you might at first blush think that of the Hatch’chan films as frivolous kitsch or possibly even a blatant rip-off; hopefully I have demonstrated that this is anything but the case.

Sooo… Anyone want to buy these off of me?

Sky Burger

On my last full day in Tokyo I finally took some time to enjoy the view from my 18th-floor room, with a little help from a local burger chain…

Click here for the official legend of the distant skyline and be sure to check out my other Japan photos in a dedicated Flickr set. You can also watch my own informal 30-second tour below, plus see other videos on my YouTube Channel.

And finally, there’s a slew of micro-blog postings I made while on the trip (Jaiku is currently my favourite service), which I haven’t yet figured out how to integrate into this site. I’m working on it…

@home café

There are but five food items on the menu at Akihabara’s famous @home café: 2 variants each of cheesecake & ice cream parfait and “spughetti”. My chocolate parfait was a generous-enough serving but suffered from too much whipped cream and strangely, a bottom layer of corn flakes underneath the two scoops of frozen dairy on top.

What, you wanted more? Oh right, the whole maid thing…

If you don’t know about Akiba’s Maid Bars you should probably read this primer. I first heard of such things while watching Densha Otoko a few years ago and thus yesterday, finding myself pining for ice cream on yet another blisteringly hot day in Tokyo’s “Electric Town”, figured why not?

You first see the girls handing out flyers outside Akihabara Station — how they manage to do it in full costume with the temperature pushing 40 degrees celsius is beyond me. I had actually been given a flyer for a different bar but couldn’t find it, and instead happened upon @home by accident. Good thing, because I think it’s the most popular of them all — each of the top three floors of the building it was in had lineups outside the door!

Like Hooters in the US and A there were both male and female clientele inside; also like Hooters my experience here wasn’t the least bit titillating — maid bars specifically are mostly kitsch, or more accurately kawaii. It’s a bit sad that teenage boys (and men) come to these places just so they can talk to a girl, and this English-speaking tourist must have seemed just as awkward to the servers.

The first maid who served me had some kind of eye infection — either that or there’s some Otaku fetish for eyepatches that I’m not aware of. She was quickly replaced by the closest thing to an English-speaking person that the establishment had. Our conversation went something like this:

Maid: “Where are you from?”
Me: “I’m from Canada.”
Maid: “Canada? I’m going to Cambodia next spring…”

I did find it fascinating watching the other customers interact with the maids. For an extra charge you can have your photo taken with your server (which I asked for but didn’t get) or play a game with them. I watched the kid next to me play a miniature version of Hungry Hungry Hippos with his waitress — er, maid — not seeming to notice that she was logging every round on a piece of paper, presumably to know when her obligation was done and she could get the hell out of there.

Though I didn’t score a photo I did get a souvenir membership card to prove my attendance. It was signed by my server on the back and on the front reads “You are My Master” — which is just, you know… Wrong.

Ghibli's Getting Close

On rare occasions, it pays to be a dumb tourist — or at least look the part…

One of the landmarks I was hoping to visit during this Tokyo trip was the Ghibli Museum. If you didn’t know, Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent of Disney, or more appropriately Pixar. 2003’s Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, in fact.

Anyway, tickets to the museum are sold out for about the next three months because the studio has just released a new film. But on the advice of Q-Taro I made the trek anyway to see if I could scam my way in.

Score!

And it worked! Probably because I was solo, but perhaps also because I was dripping in sweat from the long, hot walk from Mitaka Station, one of the staff members at the gate took pity on me and wrote me up this special voucher — all I had to do was walk across the street to a Lawson Convenience Store and trade it in for a ticket.

Was it ever worth it… The basic premise of the museum is to pull back the curtain on the craft of animation, so everywhere you look there are drawings, storyboards, even filmstrips and stop-motion cameras — and you’re encouraged to actually touch this stuff!

Such a place could never exist in North America; I can’t imagine the exhibits here not getting trashed in about five seconds. Mind you, there was also a room upstairs for the children to get their ya-yas out — with a giant plush scale model of the cat bus from Totoro.

I have no photos of the inside of the museum, as they are strictly prohibited. So you’ll just have to come to Tokyo and see it for yourself!

Fanboy

It was straight to business on my first full day in Tokyo; right after breakfast Q-Taro met up with me in the lobby of my hotel and we headed for Tokyo Big Sight and the Wireless Japan Expo.

Despite being open to the public it wasn’t really a consumer show. In fact, it was actually a little underwhelming, with the biggest crowds at the DoCoMo where the company was showing off their “new” BlackBerry. I choice instead to document the entire family of the company’s spokesfungi:

What made the rest of the event worthwhile for me was having a resident keitai expert at my side, showing me how Japanese mobile users can watch broadcast television on their handsets for free using 1seg, and quite frankly blowing my mind just a bit with two other facts about the wireless industry here that I didn’t know, including:

1. Just like back home in Toronto, you can’t actually get a signal in most trains here (when it’s underground, that is). The reason why you see everyone hammering away on their keypads is likely because they’re drafting a message to send to their friends when they get off at their stop to meet them.
2. Smartphones aren’t actually popular in Japan! Even with on-board TV tuners, QR Code readers and mobile wallets, most Japanese keitai are still considered lowly feature phones.

Q-Taro also relayed to me the story of the iPhone launch in Tokyo. He waited in line outside the SoftBank store in Harajuku for some sixteen hours for his, but only because employees guaranteed that the first 1200 people in line would get one, and sent everyone else home.

And the way SoftBank gets around the $199/$299 worldwide price tag mandated by Apple? There’s no contract per se, but customers pay the full, unsubsidized cost for their iPhones (around $800 CAD for the 8 GB model) then get a monthly rebate on their bill that works out to the difference over three years of service.

I got an interesting demo of the iPhone’s unique for-Japan-only solution to predictive text, but after a day of swapping our mobiles back and forth I think Q-Taro was warming up to my Nokia E61i more than me to his iPhone — I’m sure he’ll deny it, though.

We’ll be shifing into travel blog mode for today, but I’ll have news from the Japan Wireless Expo tomorrow…

So I made it to Tokyo (obviously) but the trip over had a couple of rough spots at either end.

In the Maple Leaf Lounge at Pearson airport I had to endure a slew of verbal abuse from some sales dude sitting behind me because I asked him to use his indoor voice while talking into his BlackBerry. I take full responsibility for interrupting his call (which was wrong) but honestly, the guy was talking so loudly that the entire lounge could hear him. As soon as he hung up he proceeded to lay into me, calling me, among other things a fat-ass (technically correct, as I’m not yet at my ideal weight) and faggot (a bit of a stretch, but I could at least see where he was going given that, unlike him, I wasn’t wearing a golf shirt and khakis and didn’t have one of those bad sales guy perm jobs).

It was one of those moments where I felt the need to stand up myself, but while getting into fisticuffs would make for a great story, it would kind of suck to be banned from Pearson Airport for life and not be able to travel again. Sorry for letting you down.

Legroom to spare!

My fortunes immediately changed for the better the moment I stepped on board my plane. I scored a sweet, sweet bulkhead seat and had the pleasure of sharing my flight with a fellow young Canadian named Vlad. He was going to Japan for the very first time like I did seven years ago, but his command of the Japanese language put mine to shame.

Thirteen hours later we landed in Japan, and like all foreigners now got photographed and fingerprinted — no big deal for me, as Interpol already has my prints from the two security guard jobs I worked in my younger days.

If you squint you can see it...

Grabbing the NEX from the airport into town was also a breeze, but the second bit of trouble started when I got off. My hotel is connected to Shibuya Station, but the station itself is so large that I didn’t realize how far away I was when I walked out through the ticket gates. And it got worse. One of the streets I had to cross was so busy that it had one of these insane pedestrian overpasses that I had to drag my bags and my fat ass up and over. By the time I reached the check-in desk I was covered in at least a couple layers of sweat.

A quick shower later I was ready to buy some supplies and get a cheap dinner at my favourite Japanese burger joint. I guess I’m getting a little older and wiser, as this time ’round I’m really noticing the wincing and rolling eyes when I stumble through basic transactions in my awful Japanese. We’ll see if it gets any better over the course of the week…

Today we take a look at Nokia Maps 2.0 for the N95 8GB. It’s availability hasn’t yet trickled down to my trusty E61i, but with only a month and a half before my trip to the Japan Wireless Expo I’m hoping for an update before I leave — here’s why…

In my review of Nokia Maps 1.0 I wrote that its killer feature over the ubiquitous Google Maps was the ability to store local map info on your handset. This is especially important for Canadian wireless customers who are being colossally ripped off for mobile data, and absolutely crucial for international travel with Fido, where such data costs 5 cents per kilobyte above and beyond the allowance of any data plan.

So far so good, but… Here’s all you see of my favourite Tokyo intersection with version 1 of Nokia Maps. I guess it’s partly because the naming conventions of the Japanese language don’t always translate what with the Prefectures and such, and also because there are actually many streets in the city without any names at all — whatever the case, there’s clearly no way I could use this software to find my way from Shibuya Station to my favourite hotel, even if it’s located directly across the street…

Fortunately Nokia Maps 2.0 comes with this handy satellite view! Click on the screen or here to see exactly where my hotel is.

These hi-res satellite images rival anything I’ve seen on Google Earth — on a small screen, anyway — and I can suck ‘em all down to my compatible handset with Nokia’s Map Loader, or even more easily via my home WiFi connection.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the 5MB of satellite imagery I needed to figure out where Shibuya crossing was would have cost me a whopping $250 CAD at 5¢ per kb!!!

Oh, and that little icon bottom centre is to let you know that by pressing the centre key of your handset you’ll get a pop-up menu where you can, among other things, save what’s on your map as a favourite place.

Nokia Maps 2.0 is certainly one of my favourite S60 apps — or at least it would be if Nokia would only release it for the E61i…

Even though I’m covering much of the same ground as I did in my original iPhone verdict, I feel compelled to weigh in on this week’s hysteria about the iPhone’s potential release in Japan. I’m not sure if this is an example of Apple’s reality distortion field, yet another case of Americans mistakenly thinking that they’re the centre of the universe (notice the Canadian spelling of centre, bitches!) or perhaps a bit of both, but make no mistake — in Japan the iPhone will ride at the back of the bus.

Consider the services that DoCoMo, Japan’s largest carrier, bundles with their typical handset. Again I’m repeating myself here, but I turn to the cheeky folks at Symbian, who have produced a nice video primer on the subject:

In addition to the technologies detailed in the video:

• Biometric authentication via fingerprint and/or face
• Mobile wallet
• Wireless key entry

Current Japanese keitai also feature:

• 2D barcode readers
• Point-of-purchase brochure downloads with RFID
• Live streaming television

So to all you Apple zealots out there I say this: The only reason to wet yourself over a Japanese iPhone is because it has the potential to bring revolutionary technologies to the Western World… And not the other way around!