i-mode – My Phone Book

Chapter 16 – My First Camera Phone

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:41:23 +0000

The first camera phone that I ever saw was the Nokia 7650 in the summer of 2002, at an electronics shop in a mall down the road from my Sydney hotel. It was a hulking brute of a vertical slider that cost upwards of a thousand Australian dollars, and wouldn’t even work in North America. The first camera phone that I actually used wasn’t made for North American markets either; it was another Japanese keitai that I rented for my second trip to Tokyo in January, 2003.

I had a buddy from high school who worked the IT racket in the United States. His frequent paid-for flights back and forth between Toronto and Dallas gave him enough points to enjoy a first class return trip to the faraway land where his favourite animé and manga were made. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along.

Since my inaugural visit to Japan in 2001 NTT DoCoMo (of i-mode fame) had introduced a new service called i-shot, enabling its users to share photos via the built-in cameras on their handsets. Nothing special today, I know — but back then it was enough for me to justify my entire trip.

I secured an i-shot compatible phone once again via Japan Cell Phone Rentals, and upon my return to the Excel Hotel Tokyu in Shibuya a package was waiting for us at the front desk, just like the first time. Inside was a Mitsubishi mova D251i, in “dusty rose” — that is, the one meant for girls.

I snapped about fifty 120×120-pixel photos that trip — of cars, food, signs, toys, myself… I had always been a fan of digital cameras, and accustomed as I was to the restrictions of low resolution photography I felt that I could adequately exploit this oddly small and square palette. Plus, there was something incredibly liberating about having a camera with you at all times, one you could keep at the ready in a pocket rather than a bag or knapsack.

But having a connected camera was the best part of all. Snapping a photo from the streets of Tokyo and sending it to a friend halfway around the world by email immediately after was — at that time, at least — the stuff of science fiction. Never mind that said friend halfway around the world was at that moment more than likely sound asleep. And that I racked up and extra fifty US dollars in data charges over and above my one hundred dollar handset rental. And that I discovered that the phone had a removable memory card only after I had emailed every single photo to myself from the handset.

The future, it seemed, didn’t come cheap.

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Mitsubishi mova D251i

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:55:48 +0000

Here’s the “dusty rose” (pink) version of this early 2000s vintage DoCoMo camera phone, courtesy of an online auction. Why the pink one? Because that’s exactly what JCR rented to me for my second-ever trip to Tokyo in January, 2003.

The handset was made by Mitsubishi, which I figured out from its entry in the Japanese version of Wikipedia. Additional photos of the non-pink version can be seen here. And waddaya know, DoCoMo’s 2002 press release for the D251i is still online:

The company’s i-shot service, which allows users to transmit still images taken with compatible mobile phones that feature built-in digital cameras, was launched on June 1, 2002, and it quickly became popular among users… The mova D251i phone is compatible with Sony’s Memory Stick Duo and is capable of saving a total of 1,670 photos.

Keep that memory stick in mind as you read Chapter 16, which should be up tomorrow…

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Chapter 11 – My First Keitai

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:56:28 +0000

While North America and Europe were still stumbling with WAP, Japan was enjoying the world’s first successful mobile Internet. It was called i-mode and was a product of the Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. I’ve read two excellent books on the subject — John C. Beck’s DoCoMo: Japan’s Wireless Tsunami and Mari Matsunaga’s Birth of i-mode — and as I understand it there were two deciding factors that made DoCoMo’s creation an instant hit: First, Internet for home computers was prohibitively expensive in Japan and second, Japanese users were quite all right with a pay-per-page walled garden that was more like AOL than the wild west of the open web.

I saw my first i-mode phone (keitai, to use the proper Japanese term) during my 2001 studies at The Canadian Film Centre. It was the property of a visiting lecturer — I don’t even remember what the talk was about, all I remember is the phone. It was shocking red and impossibly thin. It was like holding the future in my hand.

Later that summer I paid my first-ever visit to Tokyo, ostensibly to figure out my “career crisis” — that is, how to transfer my creative skills from old media to new. But truth be told I really just wanted to check out the keitai culture and use an i-mode phone. Some money I’d made from a TV show made the trip possible; for the keitai I found a company operating out of Hawaii called Japan Cell Phone Rentals. They’re still in business today. My handset would be waiting for me at my Tokyo hotel on the day of my arrival; upon departure I would simply put everything into a return mailer and leave it at the front desk.

Sure enough, upon check-in at the Shibuya Excel Hotel Tokyu I was handed a small package; inside was an i-mode enabled Panasonic P503i HYPER. I’m fairly certain that this particular unit was meant for a female user — the case was “dusty rose” (pink) — but I didn’t care one bit. Nor did I care that I couldn’t actually do much with it, what with the minor hurdle of not being able to read Japanese and all. I did manage to pull up an English-language i-mode menu, and browsed The Daily Yomiuri every morning over breakfast at my hotel. Like a boss.

Words cannot do justice to the geeky joy I felt walking the streets of Tokyo, wandering past the racks of display phones in Akihabara, seeing people on trains silently hammering out messages to friends they were on their way to meet… I was thrilled to be in the company of a populace who understood that mobiles could do so much more than make calls. And my god, the handsets were beautiful — colour screens, clear as day with brightly-coloured housings to match. I had read somewhere that Japanese keitai users preferred clamshell phones by and large, but you could procure pretty much any form factor you wanted in this, the world’s most advanced market for mobile phones.

On the last day of my trip I dutifully sealed my keitai into its return mailer and dropped it off at my hotel’s front desk. On the express train to the airport I watched out the window as Tokyo slipped away from me. Was it brave or stupid to transport myself to the other side of the planet on a whim? I still don’t know… I learned a scant few Japanese phrases while I was there, mostly ways to apologize — just paying for something at a convenience store was a struggle. But folly or not, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I’d never forget. And I never thought I’d be back in that part of the world so soon.

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Panasonic P503i HYPER

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:49:34 +0000

According to the good folks at Japan Cell Phone Rentals, it was the i-mode enabled Panasonic P503i HYPER that they rented to me for my first-ever trip Tokyo in August of 2001. I forgot to take a photo of the actual handset (duh), but here’s a pic from the Japanese version of Wikipedia:

I seem to remember that either this phone or one I rented on a subsequent trip wasn’t actually silver — it was “dusty rose” (pink), like the photo in this review. You can see some more detailed pics of a red P503i, including screens, on this Japanese page. An English-language PDF detailing the features of this model can be downloaded directly from NTT DoCoMo.

Here’s a display rack of keitai in Tokyo’s famous Akihabara district. If you want to read more about my 2001 trip I blogged about it here.

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