New keitai

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:28:00 +0000

Anyone who has looked at the Flickr pictures I just mentioned, may have noticed that the ‘camera’ used to take the more recent ones is different from that used to take the first few. (Sanyo vs. Toshiba). This is because I have another keitai (mobile phone). Unfortunately the 4 month old Toshiba didn’t survive the stag night, so I went out, braved pathetic service in a few shops before finally finding a decent phone in a decent shop. I’m still with Au though as a carrier as they have good service and decent coverage.

The new one is a Sanyo W31SA, which is one of the uber-new WIN phones, meaning it has a camera, GPS, BREW, FM radio and all the normal things, but also a 2.4Mb download ability. Yup, that’s more than my UK friends can dream of getting on their ADSL landline, and I get that to my mobile. The English page is here.

Two interesting functions are a real two way English/Japanese dictionary (the other keitai I had faked this by letting you input your own words and definitions, which is pointless), and for Japanese users, and OCR English dictionary - you point the camera at a sign or word in English, and it tries to recognise it and do an instant lookup, and I have to say that it works pretty well.

マナーから、ルールへ。

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:10:11 +0000

Post from keitai

As I was walking around the Imperial Palace today, I was behind two chaps as pictured, who were slowly cycling along. On the back of their jackets it says,「マナーから、ルールへ。」and underneath 「千代田区」, which I guess translates to around ‘From manners to rules’ and underneath ‘Chiyoda-ku’. I could be wrong, but I see this being one of two things - either they support everything ‘from manners to rules’, or they’re going to make manners the rules. Some kind of day-glo behaviour police. The second line means they either work for that Ward office, or that’s their gang chapter. Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

bad tech week, good tech week

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 03:19:21 +0000

Well, it’s been one of those weeks for personal technology - first my Palm 515 started having power/reset issues, then my mobile phone just stopped working.

First things first - I’ve had my 515 for just over 2 years, and it has served me well, housed in the nigh on bullet-proof case I bought for it. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago it would just randomly restart, admittedly with no lost data, but just restart - which was kind of annoying. Then, earlier this week, it just wouldn’t take a charge from either of the 2 cradles I tested it on. This is a something friend had seen with his, and the only fix seems to be to do a hard reset (though some say a soft sometimes works) and then power up and re-sync. This is really annoying though, so I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new Palm and keep the 515 for reading on snowboarding trips.

After spending a couple of days reading reviews and being honest about my own usage patterns, I decided on the Zire 72 - especially when I found the ‘Special Edition’ one which was metallic silver instead of the standard blue. I say metallic, but the Zire’s at the lower end of PalmOne’s current range, and have plastic bodies rather than the metal my 515 had. The 72 has a lot of features I will use though - a 1.2MP camera which can do movies, Bluetooth for syncing, (and it now also has an industry standard mini-USB for that too, which means you don’t have to buy expensive Palm cables to take another sync cable on the road) and actually comes with a decent software bundle for Macs, including ‘Documents to Go’. The screen is a huge improvement too, a ‘hi-res’ 320*320, double the 515 and it shows. It’s also much faster with apps I use like AvantGo, Plucker and Metro thanks to OS5 and a much faster CPU.

At 30,000yen, it was cheaper than my 515 by 20,000, though that price was inflated because at the time, getting English language PDAs in Japan was really hard (it was just after Ikeshop started shrinking), and most internet companies wouldn’t ship to Japan. Now Palm OS in Japan is pretty much just Sony, and the import shops like LAOX are still really expensive, but on the internet there are several people who will ship to Japan. The company I used is called Expansys, and though they’re based in the UK, my Palm was shipped from their Hong Kong office at not much above PalmOne’s retail price, which is great.

All in all then it was a decent result from a rather disappointing hardware issue.

The second issue was my cell phone. My Sony Ericsson just died on Wednesday, so I took it apart, cleaned everything up, and put it back together and it seemed OK. Then on Friday it died again. Completely. I couldn’t even get in to get photos or mail out. It was a dead phone. It was deceased.

I toyed with the idea of getting the 18 month old S-E one replaced, but it was battered and bruised and the shop didn’t look at hopeful that it could be for less than the price of a new one. I should also say that that was my second SonyEricsson, and I haven’t been massively impressed with it, so I thought I’d look at another manufacturer. As I decided to stay with the KDDI/Au carrier, I looked at their new uber-phones - the CDMA-WIN series. They do everything, TV, radio, blah blah blah but these phones are getting huge. I liked a Sanyo one but it was just enormous, and I’d already decided that my old SonyEricsson was the largest keitai (mobile phone) I would have, so I looked at some others in their more standard CDMA 1X range, and settled on a Toshiba A5506T model, which is bilingual, has a great screen, and a really nice design to it - it’s smoother and more rounded than many so is more comfortable to hold. the screen is really nice, and the whole interface is much better than the Sony’s. It also takes miniSD cards, which means I can _back-up_ my contacts and photos - everything on the phone - to a mini-SD card, and even use it in my new Palm! That was pretty much the clincher, so I got it with a 128Mb miniSD and off I went. Hoping this one lasts longer!

All in all then, it’s really annoying I had unplanned expenditure like this just before the snowboard season, but not too bad in that I think I got 2 even better items which I use on a daily basis - believe me, my Palm and keitai are probably the 2 most used things I carry around with me - except maybe my wallet.

Keitai on Nanikore

New keitai

マナーから、ルールへ。

bad tech week, good tech week