On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, David G. Imber posted:
> I get to Japan often, and have purchased phones for others. It
> happens that I've been with Sprint for nine years, which has naturally
> limited my options a good deal.
Rumor states that KDDI au is switching channels to the same ones used
elsewhere in the world, so presumably newer KDDI au phones will roam with
Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, and Telus in North America. The problem is in
getting the subsidy code from KDDI (AFAIK, Verizon is pretty unique in
using a subsidy code of 000000 for all their phones), and then getting
your carrier to activate that ESN (Verizon CSRs will if you ask really,
really, nicely -- I've done it).
>> You have to ask yourself -- what is it that you want besides Japanese
>> capability? If you want a media player, go with iPhone.
> I do not. I dislike MP3. My wife does, and she holds a slight
> edge in the voting, don't ask me how.
I can imagine!
> One feature of the iPhone that does make a very positive
> impression is the Safari mobile browser. I haven't yet seen a RIM or
> Palm device with a useful browser.
Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch is hyped as being a full browser, but of
course it is not really "full" and is idiosyncratic in its own ways
(albeit not as bad as WAP).
There is a bug in the current
1.1.4 release that requires you to jailbreak
your iToy and change some filesystem ownerships to make Safari work with
some pages that have logins. For example, Hotmail won't work at all
usefully until you do that. I don't know if they fixed it in 2.0 or not.
> I must admit I haven't really
> examined this aspect of the Windows Mobile platform, but I imagine it
> would be strong as well.
It depends. The WM version of IE is a basically a WAP browser. You
need to buy something like Opera Mobile to get a real browser on WM.
The real problem with both WM and iToy is the lack of screen resolution.
The iToy has better resolution than most WM phones, but it pales compared
to the screen on the Nokia N800. It's actually possible to view a page on
the N800/N810 without having to zoom in and out all the time like you do
on the iToy.
Good luck!
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
