Lost in Japan

Today is MNP-day in Japan. MNP stands for Mobile Number Portability (Japanese Wikipedia, English Wikipedia) and basically means that you can switch mobile phone provider without changing your phone number. Before starting to work in the telecom industry, I would have thought that it did not take any great technical effort to do so, but I have come to understand that it is no walk in the park.

Here in Japan, the cell phone industry is very interesting at the moment. As you know, Softbank bought out Vodafone’s Japanese operations earlier this year, and started using the brand “Softbank” from October 1. Since Softbank took over, there has been a big change in the branding and advertising of the company. While Vodafone heavily focused on brand image and globalization, Softbank is clearly more local and to the point in their advertising. Vodafone used famous stars trying to push an image of Vodafone onto the public, whereas Softbank are using more traditional Japanese advertisements emphasizing the products or pricing plans.

The day of MNP has been known for a while now, and there has been massive speculation over what will happen when this possibility is introduced. Given the past poor performance of Vodafone, and recent good performance by KDDI’s au, it has been the common opinion that surely Vodafone will lose a lot of customers to the more hip and technically advanced au after October 24. The third (and largest) player, NTT Docomo has been generally believed to stay rather flat, maybe losing a few customers to au as well.

However, with the change from Vodafone to Softbank, all bets are now off again. Softbank have been very active in the media lately, and as I said above, has vastly changed its image and distanced itself from Vodafone which probably have had a positive effect on its brand. No longer are the same clunky phones used in Europe also marketed in Japan, but new, slim, modern phones unique for Japan are starting to show up. Further, the held a big press event last night on the eve of the MNP announcing 予想外割引 (‘Yosogai Waribiki’ = Unexpected Discount) which is a super-discounted plan open to people signing up for a Softbank account from today until January 15, 2007. Basically you pay 2,880 Yen per month (about $25) and for that you get 200 free minutes per month as well as basically free messaging and 2 months free web-browsing and some other things. With this extremely cheap plan as well as a generally low pricing structure compared with its competitors, I would not be surprised if Softbank actually gains users through the MNP instead of losing them.

My predicitions (will check the stats at the end of the year to see if I was correct):

au : Will gain some users (mainly from Docomo)
Docomo : Will lose some users (mainly to Softbank)
Softbank : Will gain some users (mainly from Docomo)

[UPDATE]
It seems I might be right… Softbank stops accepting new applications due to overflow of orders

Japanese cell phone operator au (KDDI) presented their “Spring Lineup” of new phones yesterday, and there are a few quite interesting models! The link goes to the au page presenting the seven new models – it’s in Japanese, but there’s some amazing Flash work done, and you can at least check out the pictures.

The phones released are:

W41SA from Sanyo, W41S from Sony-Ericsson, W41T from Toshiba, W41CA from Casio, W41K from Kyocera, W41H from Hitachi, and Neon. Neon is a quite interesting looking phone, designed by Naoto Fukasawa who is a designer from the Japanese design company PlusMinusZero.

Being Swedish, I am of course interested in the newest S-E model, W41S, which looks darn nice, and has some good specs too. You can check the details of W41S here (in Japanese though). In short, it weighs 119g, has 250 hours standby, 240×320 TFT screen (24bit color), 40 MB memory (can be expanded via Memory Stick Duo to 2 GB), 1.3 Mpixel camera, stereo virtual surround speakers, support for mobile SUICA (use the cell phone to pay your train fare), can display non-mobile webpages, and has a wide range of functionality when it comes to downloading/transferring music back and forth between the phone and your pc.

So CNET announced their Blog100-list and a lot of good blogs and pesudo-blogs ended up being among the coveted 100.

And… even though CNET themselves state that it’s hard to define what a blog is;

Of course, such a list is bound to generate vigorous agreement and vehement dissent. It’s impossible to even get universal agreement on the definition of a blog.

the people of Fark just wouldn’t shut up about it… It’s the usual “We Farkers Are So Cool And Above Anything Mainstream” crap…. Anyway, the heated discussion that mounted from Fark.com making the list is simply hilarious! I mean what does it even matter if CNET calls you guys a “blog” ? Ok, so the majority of you don’t want to be called a blog… well get over it! Not every blog is an introverted 17-year-old’s Livejournal, you know!

OK, moving along. This last part I will dedicate to some of the smaller, lesser known products which I found kind of exciting.

First off is the Mini 2004 Stereo Integrated Amplifier (2 x 12 W Ultralinear Class AB) from Hong Kong maker Audio Space which is one of the largest Chinese makers of high-end vacuum tube amplifiers. I listened a little to a demo of one of their amplifiers, but the room was crowded and I was far outside any sweetspot, so I couldn’t really judge the quality. The Mini’s were awfully cool looking though!

Next up is the Assam polyhedric speakers from Solid Acoustics. Check out the picture below! These were demoed in a very open space so I really couldn’t judge the quality of these either, however they looked radically different from any other speaker I’ve seen, so I’d love to take a closer listen to them at some point!

And finally one interesting product was the CA-S3 micro-size integrated amplifier from Flying Mole (great name!) which is really tiny at only 130 x 54 x 142 mm in size! The minimalistic design was really sweet (just one big volume knob and a power button in a sleek silver casing) and it will fit just about anywhere. When demoing this, the company had connected it to an iPod, so there is no way in judging the quality but the specs looked very good on paper… (Hooking up iPods to high-end amps seemed to be the latest fad, I even saw a company hook one up to a $1,000+ tube amp!) It wasn’t extremely expensive either, the SGRP was 70,000 Yen.

(sorry for the bad picture, I never took one myself)

Moving on with the report from the A&V Festa 2005 in Yokohama, Japan. (First part of the review is in the previous post.)

The most exquisite sound I’ve heard in a long time was encountered in the demo room of German high-end manufacturer mbl. They had an awesome setup of dual monoblocks (mbl 9011), a preamp (mbl 6010) and two extremely beautiful and nice sounding speakers, the mbl 101E. I will try to scan an image of them (did not take a photo) because I’ve never seen anything like them! (They cost 5,300,000 Yen; i.e. $53,000!)

By the way, I got to comment on the visitors too. You could easily distinguish three types of visitors to the exhibition. True audiophiles, regular people (the entrance was free, so I think a lot of people came because of that) and a large number of otakus, whose only purpose, it seemed, was to photograph the cute womean standing in the booths! I swear, most of them didn’t even feign an interest in the acutal product, they just wanted a snapshot of the cutie handing out the pamphlets!! Amazing! But the sheer number of them must mean that it’s common; after all, this was the first trade show I’ve ever been to in Japan, so I don’t have any experience!

[to be continued again...]