2 posts tagged “cell phone”

This Saturday I visited my host family and did lots of fun things. One of the least interesting was setting up my cell phone for watching television. They broadcast television over 1seg here, so I can watch for free. But since the feature was hidden behind 4+ "please press OK" dialogs, I wanted native speakers to do it for me to make sure that I wouldn't agree to something that would cost extra.

Anyway, it's been a mixed experience so far. I've only gotten reception of one channel from my room, and it's not a channel I'd normally watch: the current show features two women embroidering their purses and sharing them with what appear to be neighborhood friends, and the previous program was a cartoon grandmother sharing her cooking secrets.

Despite this, what I love is that there is closed captioning for all of this. It scrolls by faster than I can read all of it, but I can catch some known kanji this way, and can also quickly scan it for the sentence structure based on particles and spacing.

Just another plot to up my exposure for this last month before I go.

Edit: Here's how it works while the phone is docked, which is convenient for home use.

Today I purchased and received a 携帯 (けいたい - mobile phone) from AU. It's a Hitachi W43H, actually. It came free with the contract. It's awesome: the camera has higher resolution than I've seen in US cell phones, it picks up local wireless Japanese television, it has an IR port over which you can share address book entries (like your own), and (obviously) has Japanese input support. It's much faster than my Motorola RAZR, too.

Since it came free, these features probably don't seem that astounding to Japanese people (and probably those from some other non-US countries), but relative to the phones I've seen or owned in the US, this one is high end.

I don't have the bill handy, but I believe our plan is ~￥２，５００ (~$21) per month. There is a ￥１，０００ (~$8) surcharge for each of the first two months which is used to cover advanced features not in our plan like TV and Internet, things we wouldn't get hooked on or even try if they didn't force us to pay for them up front. I'm not sure of the numbers because we were buying via a translator, so it was like a game of Telephone, except with numbers and contract-speak.

At any rate, the plan is very cheap, but this is because it comes with only 30 minutes of talk time per month. It is technically a "family" plan, and I think calling other AU phones is free of charge, leaving the 30 minutes to be used for calling land-lines and cell phones from other carriers---numbers of people outside your "family."

We were able to use the family plan because they don't care whether all the phones go to people that are related to the person who opens the account, so we each paired up into two-person "families" and plan to pay our bills separately.

We compared prices with SoftBank. SoftBank's plans are ridiculously cheap---I believe they are less than ￥１，０００ (~$8) per month---but their minimum contract length is 2 years, and their cancellation fee is however much money you have left to pay for your contract length. This turned out to be more expensive than using AU for four months and canceling for ￥３，０００ (~$25).