High-tech cellphone Japan FINALLY gets a “smart phone”
Japan’s Willcom unveils smart phone
TOKYO — Willcom Inc., a Japanese low-cost wireless telephone service provider, unveiled ….a smart phone by Sharp Corp. …that combines handheld computer functions with a phone….the W-ZERO3…comes with a sliding keyboard that allow users to send and receive lengthy e-mail messages as well as surf the Web and perform other data functions…more…
Jaapn has the most advanced cellphones on the planet. Period.
Japan also has the crappiest cellphone interfaces on the planet. Exclamation point.
Even more oddly, almost no cellphones in Japan have Treo or Blueberry style keyboards. There’s just one Docomo with a built-in thumbboard. There’s nothing remotely PDA-like available here because thumbing on the phone numeric keypad is relatively efficient in Japanese (because the Japanese language is so inefficient for any kind of key input). Finally, it took a foreign company, WILLCOM Inc, to figure out that corporate users need a better way to answer their email and work while on the go. When they start selling the phone for less than 50,000 yen or (about $430 USD) in December, they ought to capture the lucreative market estimated to be as many as 27 million persons who want “high-end multi-function phones.”
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