The iPhone landscape has changed somewhat over the last few days. Finally now we have a choice other than SoftBank if we want to own an iPhone. For some of us the fact that we needed at least 24 months remaning on our visa to sign up for their 2 year contract was the killer. For others it was the rumors of poor network coverage or just the desire to wait until the spec was a little closer to the Android phones. If you haven’t got an iPhone yet, it is easier now. But which provider is the best deal? Softbank or au by KDDI?

The short answer boils down to two key factors. If your decision is purely driven by money, the answer is Softbank. But, if you are a heavy user or you just hate waiting for web pages to pop up then I hate to say it but you should probably be going with au. Below I’ll walk you through some of the other differences and throw in another option to include, and help you come to your own verdict.

The price issue is simple. With au, it costs you an extra 500 yen each month on your “all you can chew data” set. Depending on a the model you choose it might also cost you more to purchase the iPhone itself through au. If you are transferring to au from another carrier and satisfied with the most basic iPhone (16GB) you will end up with a “free” phone at the end of a 24 month contract. If, on the other hand, you are an existing au customer and you want the high-end model (64GB) then you will be up for an extra 8,500 yen to purchase the iPhone itself even at the end of your 24 months.

There are a few other hidden costs that go both ways. au only gives you free SMS with other au subscribers (for Softbank they are all included for “free” in the data package). au has a wider variety of voice plans with discounts for people which are worth looking into for people who use their iPhone as a “phone”, too. Softbank’s standard rate per minute to non-softbank phones in 42 yen. au’s is the same but you can get it down to about one third of this if you wanted to (20 minutes per month is the rough cut off line for considering other packs). Both companies now offer free calls between 1AM-9PM to owners of other phones in the same network.

But what about the speed? If you listen to Son-san at Softbank he’ll point out that the theoretical maximum speed at Softbank is 14 M/bs (upload) and only 3 M/bs at au. It sounds like a no brainer to choose SoftBank. The problem is that SoftBank just doesn’t have the network quality to achieve those speeds with the density of users they have online. While it’s official “population coverage” is only 1% behind that of au, the reality is that the number of antenna covering each area is much lower than au (and DoCoMo for that matter). If you are lucky then you will sometimes get a very fast connection speed but the reality is that as soon as other people in the same vicinity are using the SoftBank network at once, the speeds drop dramatically. Think Shibuya or Namba. And for that matter, think remote Okinawa.

But the speed issue doesn’t end here. The real killer for SoftBank here is the latency difference. Have you been frustrated about how long it takes for a simple webpage to be displayed on your screen (PC or keitai!). Well that is latency, the time it takes your server to connect you to the pipe. The longer the latency is, the longer you have to wait until your key press is even registered by the internets. Softbank’s latency is much, much worse than au. If you think you are wasting your life away waiting for web pages to be displayed then you are destined to sign up with au. Here is a great youtube video showing what latency is and how stark the difference is between the two companies:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those of you who can read Japanese, here is a link to a guy who has done tests for both speed and latency in three different locations.

If you doubt the statistical relevance then take a look at this guy’s chart in the middle of his page with 10 readings taken in the same location.

There is one other key factor that is swaying my decision and it has nothing to do with speed or cost. It is network type. If you go home regularly or do a lot of travelling then you might not be that keen on paying the exhorbatant prices that either company charge you when you are roaming. (Both have similar roaming abilities geographically speaking and max out at 3,000 JPY per day if you remember to sign up for their unlimited data O/S plan). That said you are unlikely to want to stop using your iPhone just because you are out of Japan. Stopping short of restricting yourself to the Wifi in your hotel room, you will want a local SIM card. If you have a Japanese purchased iPhone then you will have to jailbreak your iPhone first. This enables to download a bunch of other interesting apps but every time you upgrade your OS your phone is reset to it’s pre-jailbroken set up. The fun doesn’t stop there. Remember that if you buy an au phone that it operates on the CDMA network. It is a different model (physically) compared to the SoftBank one which is designed for GSM. GSM is the most popular in the western world. That means more choice of networks to use when overseas. Worse yet, some countries don’t even have a CDMA network (eg. Australia closed their CDMA network in 2008 and New Zealand is closing it in 2012).

If you don’t want to deal with the issues surrounding jailbreaking then your other option is to buy a SIM-unlocked iPhone direct from Apple. While you don’t get the monthly cash backs (2,000 JPY or so) from the local carriers, you don’t have to worry about signing up for a 2 year contract (or convincing softbank that your visa will be renewed and you really can take on a 2 year contract). The best way of using a SIM unlocked phone in Japan is with bmobile. For 4,800 yen a month you can get 1 GB of data and 20 minutes of free voice. (1,000-1,500 less than softbank/au). Oh and better yet because bmobile is a MVNO on the DoCoMo network you get the best quality coverage in the country. Here is their link.

Your first thought might be “Is 1 GB going to be enough?” A friend close to B Mobile tells me that very few people max out their 1 GB. If you are a really heavy user then you can actually buy a DoCoMo SIM and achieve the same thing for about 10,000 yen a month. Before you buy a SIM unlocked iPhone make sure you read the fine print on Apple’s homepage.

Given that you can already buy a SIM unlocked iPhone 4 on amazon.co.jp it won’t be long before you can buy the 4S, locally, too. Here is a rough guide to international iphone 4S prices if you have a friend in one of the countries that offer unlocked phones. I’ve included sales tax because if you happen to be travelling to that country you can probably claim back the sales tax at the airport when you leave Japan:

There are a few minor services that au don’t offer just yet (eg. iMessage and FaceTime) and you’re iPhone will only check for new mail once every 15 minutes. But these problems will apparently be solved by January of next year. SoftBank was like this with their first model of the iPhone. Another minor issue is that due to the CDMA network that au uses it is impossible to use both data and voice at the same time. That means that if you are in the middle of a download on your iPhone and you receive a call, it will automatically stop the download to take the call. On W-CDMA (the network that SoftBank uses) you are able to continue downloading the file while you are talking. Not the end of the earth but worth mentioning.

So which option do you think makes more sense? Have you got a 4S already? Can you notice the latency issues with Softbank? Tell us about it? While you’re at it, tell us how much data you use every month!

This is part two of our writeup and perspective on IDNs, especially double byte Japanese domain names. See Part One (where we went into some detail of explaining the history of the technology surrounding IDNs) before reading on. Without going into too much more history or spurting out much more technical jargon, lets explore some day to day aspects of double byte domains, how they are (or rather aren’t) used, and why they just aren’t the glowing future of Japanese internet real estate that initially they may seem to be.

As explained in part one, IDNs rely completely on your PC’s local Internet browser software to convert that Japanese domain name into a real single byte domain name. If you don’t understand what that means, it means アニメ.com (anime.com) is not actually アニメ.com at all, it is xn--cck5dwc.com. Yes, that’s right, it gets converted into our beloved combination of 37 Latin characters, even before it leaves your computer! If you are not using the latest internet browser software, then sorry, you are left at the front gate, because only the latest versions translate アニメ.com properly for you… that is, unless you are the lucky autistic one among us who is more comfortable with remembering xn--1sqt31d.com as a homepage address! (Take a look at the site 価格.jp, strangely, they display their domain name in Japanese, AND the real domain name – www.xn--1sqt31d.jp – in the title of their page!)

On the other side of the “internet tubes”, at the destination of your command (or message), it is servers that form the foundations of internet infrastructure. We are all working on servers whether we realise it or not. 70% of servers on the internet run unix. You are using unix now when you read this homepage, and likely to be when you check your email, or stream some (raunchy?) video down through bittorrent. For those who have ever dabbled in setting up their own unix internet server (or Windows server for that matter!), you know that one of the first things that you have to input when doing initial setup is the server’s domain name. A computer has to know who it is, before others can talk to it, and before it can send out information to you. Servers will not accept a double byte characters as their own name. They also will only accept the hallowed combinations of 37 characters and numbers. There is a detailed, but cumbersome JPRS guide to setting up a 日本語.jp domain name on your web server here (PDF).

So, let’s get this straight – your computer doesn’t actually look for internet servers using double byte domain names, it converts them to single byte first, (if you are lucky – this person commenting on the part one found one example where the conversion doesn’t go quite as expected), and servers wont recognize their “internationalized nickname” except for in its garbled 37 character state. But, Japanese people like using their own language on computers right? Well, it seems not so, at least when it comes to typing domain names.

The point being missed here is that Japanese people, simply don’t use kanji domain names. Internationalized Domain Names, or “IDNs” have now been around for just over 4 years. Kakaku.com (huge electronics price comparison site) was one of the first to stake their claim by snapping up 価格.com (actually xn--1sqt31d.com) in the fear that someone would take it from them. But the vast majority of Japanese computer users kept using the “romaji” – kakaku.com. Why? Well, in Japan, apart from the dying breed of post baby boomers with their yokomoji allergies, young people (the majority of computer users) here are actually extremely comfortable with typing in domain names in romaji – as opposed to the Chinese, who feel that using their own double-byte language as easier.

An interesting article on whether or not Japanese people actually want kanji IDNs found at Japaninc notes:

…Japanese who don’t use the Internet don’t do so because they are not familiar with computers, not because they are unfamiliar with English. The Internet itself is already Japanese capable — software menus and commands have long since been localized, and a universe of online information is already available in Japanese. You don’t really have to know English to use the Internet, you just need to know how to type. In fact, entering words in Japanese is often more complicated than entering them in English…

Although the article itself is not so new, the point remains. People in Japan who are not net savvy, generally the elderly, and young kids, are that way because they do not understand the concept of the Internet, and computers in general, and not because they can not tackle 26 characters of the alphabet.

For many Japanese who do consider themselves Internet capable, the factor that holds them back from IDNs is the henkan, or conversion factor. To actually get to 価格.com using its IDN, you have to type the following key strokes into your browser’s address bar:

1. “kakaku”

2. SPACE (to convert “kakaku” into 価格)

3. ENTER (to tell the computer that 価格 is actually the correct kanji out of several possibilities. Thank god 価格 was the first choice.)

4. HANKAKU/ZENKAKU key (to convert input method back into romaji to enter the single byte TLD, the .com part)

5. and then finally the “.com” on the end. You end up tapping the keyboard that many more times to get to the exactly the same site, not to mention that your computer then has to translate what you typed back to a convoluted single byte web address!. Less tapping is better and surely more user friendly – romaji here is clearly the better choice.

The above example using 価格.com is an easy one though. Imagine if you owned 孝治.com (孝治 is read koji, a common name in Japan). Step 2. above took thirteen taps of the space bar for me to find the correct kanji character. There are tens of thousands of Japanese words with same reading, but different characters.

What about non-Japanese people, living outside of Japan? In Western countries the hurdle is not just having to tap the keyboard excessively, or a browser compatibility issue. It is a Japanese language input issue. Without the ability to choose to input double-byte characters (IME) which needs to be installed (it is not automatically included with English windows). Even when you do have IDN support in IE6 (yes IE6 also sketchily supports kanji domain names in my tests), IE7, or maybe Firefox, if you are unable to TYPE Japanese, which is the case most English windows machines, then you cant type double byte characters and therefore you are blocked from accessing IDN websites… If you are a domain owner, it really doesn’t seem to be the brightest thing to do for your international users. This is probably a no-brainer anyway as most smart companies would make sure they have the romaji version of the site (kakaku.com) registered before they embarked on trying to woo the yokomoji-phobic generation with its double byte cousin (価格.com) or there would be no point right? Who in their right mind would try to build a business with 会社.com without also owning kaisha.com, and risking loosing a large percent of their business to Japanese users who are going to enter it in romaji first anyway.

Japanese domain name URLs are displayed intact by some large search engines

There is only one point that should be considered here. That is, that owning 会社.com along with kaisha.com would likely increase the SEO value of your content in search engine eyes, as the big names like google.com and baidu.com do appear to be indexing the IDNs as double byte words. Google search results in the picture to the left, clearly show Japanese domain name URLs in Japanese script. Whether this is beneficial for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) remains a mystery however, with a Google search for 新宿駅 “shinjuku station” showing 7 romaji domain names above 新宿駅.com in my browser.

Tim Romero, a Tokyo-based serial entrepreneur, however has the final say on this topic. He wrote this piece about the dirtier side of these so called Internationalized Domain Names way back in Feb 2001, only months after double byte domain names were widely available for general registration. In hindsight, how very right he was. The bottom line – which is something that can not be ignored – is that Internationalized Domain Names are another means for the huge domain registries like ICANN (that sell domain names to companies which in turn sell them to you and I) to play on the fear of companies and individuals in order to line their own pockets with cash. They charge what the market can bear, and will sell you anything they can. .jp domain names for example, cost around 10 times more than .com ones, for no particular reason. Internationalized Domain Names are superficial eye candy, patched on top of a solid Internet foundation to lure short sighted consumers, with the proverbial corporate noose around their necks. I will leave you with Tim’s full article. Despite being old, it really is a great read considering how right his predictions turned out to be:

Last December domain registrars the world over began accepting registrations for double-byte domain names. Until now, domain names have been restricted to standard ASCII characters, but the new domains allow names in Japanese, Korean, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters as well.

Proponents claim that double-byte domain names will help break down language barriers, increase the amount of multilingual content on the Internet, and make it easier for non-English speakers to use the Net. I admit that I am rather cynical by nature, but as far as I can tell, these new domains serve only to line the pockets of the domain registrars and provide no substantive benefit to the Internet community.

Contrary to the claims of some proponents, restricting domain names to ASCII letters, numbers and a few punctuation marks is not a linguistic or cultural issue. It is simply a way of ensuring interoperability. Just about every international standard in existence, from ISO country designations to airport call letters, restricts itself to similar characters.

The characters in question can be entered using almost any computer system on the planet and, as such, they represent a least common denominator. The characters do, of course, come from English alphabet, but you would be hard pressed to convince any Japanese that “Mitsubishi” is not a Japanese word, or that entering www.mitsubishi.com into a browser is anything but trivial. In fact, to enter Mitsubishi’s double-byte domain requires that it first be entered in ASCII letters and then converted to Japanese characters. The new domains are actually harder to use in that sense.

The winners here are not non-English-speaking Internet users, but the domain name registrars. Companies who held ASCII domains are now forced to register multiple double-byte variants to protect their brands. As a result, the registration of these new domains has proceeded with all the clam and order of a gold rush.

Over a million domains were registered in the first month at prices ranging from $35 to $100/year. Keep in mind that these figures are not a one-time charge. The domain holders will have to pay a like amount each and every year to maintain the rights to those domains. And, if that were not enough guaranteed annual revenue, Network Solutions has announced that it will soon be accepting domain registrations in Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. More languages will follow whenever they feel the need to add a few hundred million dollars in recurring revenue to their bottom line.

It’s rather tempting to shrug this whole thing off as one big corporation squeezing other big corporations for relatively paltry sums. However, there is a bigger issue here. We might be seeing the beginning of the Balkanization of the Internet.

Removing the least common denominator requirement effectively partitions off portions of the Internet. I can’t even give examples of the new domain names because most of my readers’ will be unable to display them, let alone visit them. Sites using a double-byte domain will be effectively unreachable by the majority of Internet users.

It can be argued that this is not a problem since a web site with a Japanese domain name will be in Japanese, but current trends speak against that claim. More and more sites are multilingual. I suppose a different domain could be used for each language supported, but I fail to see any advantage in such a scheme.

The Internet, however, is more than the Web, and it certainly seems likely that employees of a Japanese company with a double-byte domain name will need to communicate with a someone whose computer does not support Japanese. Likewise, there will be those outside Japan who will want to download a file from a Japanese FTP server. Double-byte domains will make this difficult. Fortunately, for the moment, the new domain names do not work with email or FTP.

The most amazing aspect of the Internet, that from which all else springs is ease and freedom of communication: The ability for a person in Minsk to communicate with someone in Osaka, Dallas, Seoul or Johannesburg. Double-byte domain names hinder this ability since they can only be entered by computers running a specific language. Extensive use of these new domains will effectively prevent communication between individuals who find themselves behind the walls of their national domain name schemes. Hardly the World-Wide Web we have come to know.

Any questions or comments are welcome below. I am especially looking forward to people in the other side of the Japanese IDN fence to tell me why they think I am wrong. Apart from the potential SEO value of IDNs (mentioned in the article), what else do Japanese Kanji domain names have going for them? Can they be used in email addresses yet? I couldn’t test this, as my email client (Thunderbird) told me that the address I entered as invalid when I tried to send a mail to info@ヒルズ族.com to get some pricing information..

Double Byte IDNs: “Interesting, but Useless Eye-Candy”

Internationalized Domain Names, heard of them? Double byte web addresses. You know the ones – the 日本.jps and the 価格.coms – you must have seen them lurking somewhere? Yes, these are called IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names.

Just how valuable are these “snatch up while you can” bargains that the registrars have been trying to flog to us for the last 4 or 5 years? How will these prestigious pieces of “Internet Real Estate” rear up in the next decade? Are they a potential goldmine as Asians increasingly get net savvy, or another intricate money internet sucking scam? Stippy.com decided to take a deep look into the technology and history of domain names, and find out for ourselves about IDNs.

I was recently greeted by an email offer from a friend to help find a home for this “package set” of three “Hills Zoku” IDNs:

• ヒルズ族.jp
• ヒルズ族.com
• ヒルズ族.net

They are read hillszoku (.jp, .com, and .net) referring to the Roppongi Hills area in Tokyo. The seller estimates the value of this package to be around USD 50K (and is offering a commission of up to 15%! So, if you don’t bother reading our article, are rich, and are outlandish enough to buy these, let us know!)

But seriously, do you, or anyone you know ever use these on a regular basis (other than for the novelty check to see if they actually work)? Double byte domain names will not succeed. They will remain a novelty for native speakers of double byte languages, and us gaijin alike. Although this article may get a bit “techy”, and seem a bit long winded, I am going to explain why this is so, in terms that hopefully anyone should be able to understand. The first part of this in-depth look at IDNs may be a history lesson that bores those of you who already know the technical details of how the Internet works at its deepest and most basic level. But, it so happens that history is important when discussing this topic, as there are facts and figures that may sway your opinion of double byte character usage in internet domain names (this is not just a matter of subjective feelings). So, skip the rest of this article if you are not interested in the background – go and find yourself a stippy friend! On the other hand, if you read this article (and part 2), and still think I’m missing the entire point of IDNs then I’d love to hear your side of the argument in the comment section below!
(Update: part two of this article now published HERE)

The Internet, as most now know, is an enormous array of autonomous computer networks (or, as the Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Senator Ted Stevens sees it, a “series of tubes”). These computers – and other sorts of devices – which can be running almost any operating system, and may be served off hardware that was made up to 2 decades ago, are joined in a seemingly never-ending and dynamic tangle, of information.

Unlike in human interaction, where we get along with a somewhat flexible form of communication (different languages, dialects, facial expressions, tone of voice, body language) and where it doesn’t really matter if you make small grammatical mistakes in order to convey meaning, there are a few “rules” which all of the devices on the Internet must obey in order to communicate – no matter what age, creed, race or religion to which they belong (keeping with the human analogy). The sheer nature of tens of millions of different machines, all talking different languages, all running on different architectures, at different speeds, for a nearly unlimited set of applications, necessitates a very basic, but extremely stable protocol – or rulebook – in order to talk with one another in a reliable manner.

Much of the development of these “rules” for computers to talk with each other was done in English speaking countries (USA and UK), and hence all of the underlying messaging, addressing and command structures were, and still are in English. Sure, most of the technical details of these original protocols are totally hidden to the Internet end user, except one – the domain name, or domain address. That is, the stippy.com part of http://www.stippy.com. The domain address is still the easiest way for anyone in the world to connect to any other computer in the world, which is also connected to the Internet.

The Arpanet Deployment Team – USA 1960’s

The predecessor of the Internet, which was called the “ARPANet”, was developed in the late 1960′s and, while still a far cry from the “series of tubes” we have now, used a communication system very similar in nature to that still used by modern day computers. Back then, each machine connected on the network was called a “node”. Each node of the original ARPANet was a computer called an IMP (Interface Message Processor), and what it did was hold a big text file full of computer numbers (IMP numbers) and mapped to “host names” (or simply, easier to remember “nicknames” for us stupid humans who can’t easily remember strings of numbers). To this day, the Internet does basically the same thing, with domain names.

Soon, when hundreds (and later on, thousands) of computers began connecting ARPANet. Manually storing all of the host names, and mapping them to their “node” numbers became cumbersome, and was fraught with human error, even though it was maintained in one central reference machine. A move away from the “text file” (flat host name table) approach to a more hierarchical method of storing the same mappings of computer names to numbers was necessary and very soon became inevitable.

In 1981, a proposal for a new system of Internet Name Domains – as we know them today – was drafted, and published as a Request for Comments (RFC 799). By 1983, it was decided that based on RFC 799, the “host table name system” – described above – would be replaced with a new system. And so a new era of computing was born. It was a method capable of storing and sharing millions of domain names mapped their corresponding numbers (IP addresses) hierarchically and efficiently between millions of host servers, which is still thriving today, called the Domain Name System, or DNS.

With the Internet what it is now, it is very easy to forget just why it was initially devised, and what purpose it served in its fledgling years. The ARPANet was primarily an email system, and in 1973, 75% of all packets transferred were emails, all between English native speakers. There was no requirement at the time that the network be able to transfer messages in any other language, let alone for it’s address command structure to work with non-English domain names. Hence, the whole Internet and email addresses architecture was (and still is) restricted to an extremely limited, but vastly efficient character set where only the letters of the English alphabet (case-insensitive), the decimal digits, and the hyphen are allowed. That is just 37 characters.

But, there is more than one language in the world (unfortunately!), and when the Internet began to be deployed throughout the globe in the early 1990s, some users and networking organizations in non-English speaking countries were sour that they could not use their native language script in Internet Domain Names. The Chinese and Japanese especially wanted to use Chinese characters (known of course as Kanji in Japan) in domain names. At the time, many of the heavyweight advocates of the proposal were from Japan, wishing to use their beloved kanji for Internet addressing. But, the Asian community in the 1990s were not involved in the initial architecture. Wishes were expressed without an understanding the basic issues – they were voting to build a nuclear reactor, without bothering to check if it was on a fault line. The problem – their character sets are double byte (one character requires two bytes of space (to store on a hard disk, or transmit), as opposed to Latin characters, which require only one).

Double byte characters certainly were not in the minds of the Internet “framers” when they were coming up with the messaging and command protocols that form the foundations of the “world wide web”. In fact, even now, double byte characters are renowned for 文字化け, (mojibake, garbling) even when sent as message content, and are shunned by developers and network administrators alike as useless and irritating overhead where basic Internet protocols are concerned.

The fact is, that the established rules and protocols of addressing on the Internet are stable, and they work – and they are made from rock solid Roman characters. The sheer scope of “the web”, the fact that it is an integral part of government, business, and private affairs today (at least in every developed country), dictate that changes to it’s basic standards and protocols, are virtually impossible and are to be avoided. At very least, changes to our internet foundations should not be considered for something so menial and “nice-to-have” as double-byte-capable Internet domains right? Wouldn’t internationalizing these domain names be like allowing Kanji phone numbers?

Well, it turns out though, that the dreams of the “yokomoji” (literally “sidewards characters”, a short-sighted way to refer to any language written in the Roman alphabet) adversaries came true, and what are now known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), became a reality.. well, that is in a very superficial way. Thankfully, none of the secure foundations of Internet protocol were shaken by the implementation of IDNs. They are still not really domain names in the mind of any DNS servers (and most other internet servers for that matter), and in fact, are totally reliant on user applications (on your PC!) to convert them using a complicated set of rules into the 37 Roman characters and numbers that we know and love. The Japan Registry Service (JPRS), who took over from the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) is responsible for the “smooth administration of the Internet” in Japan, and ultimately the owner of what is called the “standardization” or “normalization” of IDNs in Japan. The JPRS, being private entity are primarily a commercially minded, and nowhere on their home page do they really tackle the struggle that IDNs are facing. Their predecessor, JPNIC (a government sponsored foundation) on the other hand, state the hurdles they faced (when they were in charge) in a very pragmatic and honest manner and take a responsible and analytical look at solutions (or, workarounds at best) to the technical issues. Here is a two points from their site, where they openly reveal their wish IDNs (multilingual domain names) must not change the underlying architecture of the Internet in any way:

• Multilingual domain names must not influence current DNS use and management
• Multilingual domain names should continue to be DNS that can resolve names in any type of system, regardless of the location

They go on the mention that ultimately, IDNs need to be converted back somehow into Roman characters in order to have any chance of becoming widely utilised by the average Internet user. (You can read about many more of the issues that surround Japanese IDNs in more detail on their homepage).

Also, Jim Breen, of Monash University in Australia, one of the most respected authorities when it comes to Japanese language dictionaries and encoding Japanese and Chinese characters for use on computer systems takes a deep look at the subject and the problems that IDNs face in one of his excellent papers. He explains why Japanese domain names would have a very hard time establishing themselves as mainstream.

Internationalised Domain Names introduce one more level of complexity (like a second language barrier!) to our Internet. Even apart from the fact that most of the Internet using world can not decipher them, the underpinnings of the web are in English, and they will never succeed on a large scale.

Anyway, that is enough for today’s domain name history lesson – come back in a few days for part two, where we shall explore from a user’s perspective just why the 日本語.com IDNs of the Internet are not going to play a significant role in your life. While you are waiting, leave comments on this topic below, or read this very good article (in Japanese only) on the subject, and find out why even Japanese people are complaining about IDNs!

UPDATE: Part two of this article is now available.

Matushita Nao (松下奈緒) the girl behind E-Mobile

When you go home tonight, you might notice some new ads starring Matushita Nao (松下奈緒) for a cool looking PDA. But contrary to popular belief, this is not Softbank’s X01HT which has been receiving a lot of bandwidth in the comments section of stippy.com. Nor is it part of DoCoMo’s half-arsed attempt at marketing the blackberry in Japan , nor is it a rechurned ad for Wilcom’s hugely successful PDA of 2006, W-Zero 3. E-mobile (Japan’s youngest mobile phone carrier) has finally unveiled their virgin products for the Japanese market.

As the newest player on the street, E-mobile is still rapidly rolling out their service area and so initial service will be purely for data only (voice to start in Mar ’08) and basically only in the Tokyo and Osaka regions. Due to the obvious disadvantages of not being able to roll out voice, e-mobile have been clear about their strategy and focused on the high-end data only users. At first glance it appears as though E-mobile have surprised most market participants with the slickness of both their new datacard (D01NE by NEC) and PDA (Em-One by Sharp).

But just as Son-san was trying to do at the end of last year with his Yosoguy-wari, it seems as though E-Mobile have realized that they are not going to win market-share without being substantially cheaper than the competition. E-mobile’s package is relatively simple. First year users pay a flat fee of 5,980 per month and that entitles you to unlimited use of data on their latest technology 3.5G network (HSDPA) at speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. If you sign up for a minimum of a year then that price falls to 4,980 yen and if you sign up for a two year contract then they’ll throw in a free ADSL service to your home for nothing. To put that in perspective, up until now the “standard” for the data market (both card or PDA) was Willcom’s generous offer of 12,915 yen per month for unlimited data usage on their 408Kbps network. All I can say is look out Willy!

	E-Mobile	Willcom	Softbank
Monthly Fee	5,980 yen	12,915 yen	11,130
Data restrictions	Unlimited	Unlimited	450MB / month of data included. 1.25 yen / packet for any additional use.
Network Speed	HSDPA (3.6Mbps)	PHS (408Kbps)	HSDPA (3.6Mbps)
Coverage	Tokyo and Osaka	Nationwide	Nationwide
Approx. number of base stations	1,000	160,000	25,000
Most popular PDA	Em-one (Sharp)	W-Zero 3 [es] (Sharp)	X01HT (HTC)
Picture

The disadvantages of E-Mobile are obvious. Area coverage, area coverage and area coverage. With only 1,000 base stations (and only half of those in Tokyo) they have a long way to go before they can match any of their competitors. Obviously not having voice capability might frustrate some users (after all I use my blackberry for voice as well as data) but at least for data-card users (said to be about 1.5 million in Japan) then it is a seriously attractive proposal. Make sure you are very happy with the service though because they will charge you a cancellation fee of 2,000 yen per month of unused contract if you want to get out of the 2 year (“にねん”) plan earlier than you planned. Oh, and before you sign up in order to get the free ADSL package, you should be aware that it is for a 10Mbps speed connection (not the standard 50 Mbps connection available at Bic Camera) but hey, who’s gonna look a gift-horse in the mouth!

To me what really appeals about E-mobile’s new service is actually the PDA. Especially as I’ve been particularly frustrated with service quality on my new blackberry, I’ve been spending a lot of time checking out the other alternatives on the market. My conclusion so far had been Softbank’s sleek handset from HTC (X01HT) although it seems as though the phone-like-look of Sharp’s PDA (W-Zero3[es]) that Willcom offers has been more popular amongst Japanese people. E-mobile have clearly done their homework as they seem to have combined the best of both phones into their new Em-One (even if the name is a little boring – “EM”: “E-Mobile”). I’m sure it is no coincidence that they asked Sharp to design their first phone.

Just like the X01HT it has Bluetooth functionality and a cool hideaway keyboard but it also has the resolution quality of the W-Zero3 but on a much larger screen (4.1″) . At 4 hours, battery life is not that wonderful vs. the W-Zero 3 (4hr vs. 7hr), nor is the inbuilt camera quality as good as the X01HT (1.3M vs. 2.0M) and at 250g it is slightly heavier than the other two (both 175g). For me, there is one very cool feature that won me over that neither of the other two have – One-Seg. Although the RRP of 39,800 yen might sound a little steep, even if you cancel your contract you are still set for life with a free TV! (albeit only on a 4.1″ screen). But it is also that screen that saves you when operating the PDA every day. All three models operate on Windows Mobile 5.0 but it is just that much easier on the Em-one screen. Better yet, the high connection speeds that you get from HDSPA means that your internet connection feels as fast as it does at home for most applications.

Here at stippy.com, we’re still saving up our cash to buy one but please let us know if you are lucky enough to get your hot little hands on one before we do. They are set to hit the shops on Mar 1 with an expected “サービスイン” (start date) of April 1.

After years of refusing to enable Blackberries to work in Japan, DoCoMo finally let the technology loose a couple of months ago. Although there is still only one model available, after reading Wasabi Green’s writeup on stippy.com I couldn’t resist but giving one a test-drive. So what is the verdict? Is it really worth lashing out a couple of men (万円の複数形, plural of “万”) to buy a blackberry? The short answer is “not yet”. Read on for Stippy.com’s field review of Japan’s blackberry friendliness.

For those of you who have lived in Japan so long that you haven’t seen a blackberry, let me take away some of the mystery. The blackberry, designed by a Canadian company called Research in Motion (RIM), enables you to access most of the mod cons of your office PC from your mobile. Not only can you check emails that arrive to your work address, you can also send emails using the same address. After a quick adjusting of the standard signature settings to delete the free ad for blackberry, no-one would even know that you weren’t in your office. You can also access your work calendar and address book, but better yet, any update you make to these is automatically saved on your work computer (including scheduling of events with other work colleagues).

Recently the blackberry has been equipped with a web browser (a few actually) which enables you to browse the web on your 3” LCD screen with relative ease. You can’t quite play final fantasy like you can on a DoCoMo handset, but there is a decent selection of games that you can download from the Blackberry website. My favorite so far is meteor crusher, but I’m quickly getting addicted to Ka-Blom! (Yes, I know, I’ve been in Japan too long). The great thing about the blackberry games is that you can send your high score into the blackberry database and see where you rank out of all of the global blackberry users who’ve played that game. I’m proud to say that I regularly rank in the top 10,000 or so. (#^o^#) More importantly, security is said to be extremely high quality at RIM and this is generally quoted as the reason that it has been so popular amongst US corporates (it seems that almost every senior manager in America uses one these days.)

Equipped with a full QWERTY keyboard, the 8707g (the only model available in Japan) is very user friendly for the average gaijin. The entire operating system is in English which means you don’t have to press the “6” key five times to type the word “no”. The flipside of this is its ability to handle Japanese. While you can read Japanese that is written in emails (if you install the Japanese language font), and on homepages (if you install the right Internet broswer – the preinstalled “BlackBerry Browser” and “WAP Browser” are useless), the blackberry does not offer any support for inputting Japanese at all. A service called Namimail is available from Namikiteru, a subsidiary of DoCoMo USA (for a fee!) which enables you to input Japanese characters in a new email, but despite being difficult to use, it doesn’t enable you to use Japanese when replying to or forwarding existing emails (let alone input on a webpage). Even when you are writing a new email, namimail takes over your address-book and makes searching for names near a very complicated process) I’ve been paying the monthly fee (US$35!!) for the last few months now but have used it about twice so am currently working out how to cancel my contract. I think DoCoMo made a mistake when they decided the name of this sub, I’m sure they meant to call it “Nameteru.”

More important than the user interface is mobile reception. Given that 3G has been in Japan for so long, I (and I think most other people) had assumed without a second thought that reception would be near perfect in central Tokyo – especially as my blackberry is set up to switch between the DoCoMo and Softbank networks as appropriate in order to guarantee the best possible reception. Amazingly, this turned out to be a huge leap of faith as quite often I struggled to get reception from either. Domestic FOMA users don’t notice as most phones these days are dual-chip (ie equipped with 2G and 3G chips) but the blackberry is only compatible with 3G in Japan so the naked truth hits home. Besides having trouble inside buildings, one of the most frustrating dead spaces was at Narita airport. While the concept of a blackberry is good, it doesn’t help much if you can’t call people! (This also makes it hard to download applications like games etc unless you stand still) For budding Yoso-guys out there out there, you’ll be pleased to hear that I was pleasantly surprised by the number of times that my little blackberry automatically switched over to the Softbank network for better reception.

Docomo Blackberry scanning the network:

Docomo Blackberry finds that Softbank has a better connection:

One final tip before I go. If you are keen enough to try a blackberry without perfect reception (or you want to keep a separate phone for voice use anyway) there are a bunch of great applications out there that you can down load. My favorite at the moment is Gmail. For the first few weeks I was accessing Gmail via the blackberry web browser until I noticed some small words down at the bottom of the screen inviting me to optimize Gmail to my blackberry. Low and behold, the Gmail website detects that you have a blackberry and allows you to download a plugin that makes emailing as easy as accessing your regular outlook account. (You can even review a handful of old emails without reception as it remembers your most recent inbox for you.) If anybody else knows any interesting applications out there then we’d love to hear about them.

Oh, and needless to say, you can view www.stippy.com without a problem on your blackberry. With thanks to our sleepless Webmaster, Stippy.com released its first mobile version last month. All you need to do is access the usual URL and it will recognize that you are accessing from a blackberry (or mobile phone, or any PDA for that matter!)

* Steve88, thanks for the comment on the Stippy Pols page. It was enough to motivate me to write this article.

Less than one hour ago, Softbank Mobile‘s charistmatic CEO, Masayoshi Son, just completed an unexpected (予想外) press conference at the New Ohtani. Just as stippy.com reported last week, Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is starting this week in Japan and promises to upset the comfortable duopoly of DoCoMo and Au.

Stippy.com recevied a lot of email from readers suggesting that MNP would be a non-event, but it appears as though that is not the case. Son-san wants to join these two giants in the big technological sand pit they call success.

Following on from his amusing 予想外 TV commercial series featured last week, Son-san has made an even more unexpected announcement today. Anyone who signs up for Softbank’s new “Gold Plan” will be entitled to a Yosogaiwari (予想外割):

• Free email,
• Free SMS,
• Free voice to other Softbank subscribers…
• and as an extra teaser the first two months are completely free (including the monthly fee).

Good-bye to hard to understand teigaku (fixed price) plans, the only thing that you will have to pay for are calls to non-Softbank subscribers and access to internet sites. Better yet, the entire package will only cost you 2,880 yen per month. Given that the average person spends about 7,000 yen per month on their phone bill, that could save you about 50,000 yen a year. (Multiply that by a family of four!!)

So, you say (As I would expect any cynical reader of stippy.com to ask), what is the fine print? Son mentioned in the press conference that this deal is only available until January 15, 2007. Interestingly, Son claims that everyone who signs up between now and Jan 15 is entitled to the 2,880 yen / month plan for ever (this guy is serious).

Clearly the other “catches” have to do with what is not free. Son didn’t go into details about the pricing of calls to other carriers or the packet charge rate for accessing the internet, but absent of a large hidden price rise, this should be cheap too (Softbank is well known to be the cheapest carrier in Japan). Furthermore, Son made it very clear that it is his intention to win both the battle and the war. If either DoCoMo or Au announce reactory price cuts, he’s promised to respond with a similar package – only 200 yen per month cheaper – within 24 hours.

The only potential “catch” that we could think of was to do with area coverage/bandwidth. After Willcom introduced unlimited free calls and email between Willcom users, their network suffered serious capacity issues and had to rapidly speed up their infrastructure expansion plans. No doubt Softbank will suffer the same problem. Son has promised to double Softbank’s area coverage (number of base stations) by next March which should help stem some of the increased usage, but who knows if he will complete it in time?

Eyes and ears are now focused on Au and DoCoMo to see how they will react to such a move. Son made it very clear in his presentation tonight that he had no intention of letting DoCoMo and Au continue to earn their monopoly profits. (Remember these companies made a total of 15 billion US dollars of profit between them last year!!) And so, may the games begin!

Have you noticed that everywhere you go now, you see ads for mobile phones? Over the last month Au, Softbank Mobile and DoCoMo have slowly rolled out aggressive new advertising strategies and more new handset models at once than have ever been seen before. So why the sudden focus on improving their brand image? On October 24, Japan will officially introduce Mobile Number Portability (or MNP as the acronym loving Japanese love to call it.)

What does it all mean?

In the real world, handset makers (Nokia, Motorola, etc) are free to roam the market place because their handsets can be used with any carrier.  You can even change carriers without ever changing the handset that you use.  In contrast, the Japan carriers (DoCoMo, Au, Softbank) have a stranglehold on the distribution of handsets.   The moment you chose the handset that you want, you have no choice about which carrier you want to use as it is only compatible with one.  Historically that has meant that if you want the latest NEC handset then you have to sign up with DoCoMo. If you want the latest Sharp handset, you often have to sign up with J-Phone/Vodafone.  Accordingly, the Japanese handset makers are much more dependent on the carriers to develop and promote interesting new services that work with their phones.  In the pre-MNP days that meant that in order to get your hands on that wonderful LCD equipped Sharp handset, then you had to give up your old DoCoMo or Au phone number (because let’s face it, who uses Vodafone these days.) Although it sounds like a silly system, it is a (perhaps logical) result of the current (slightly less logical) Japanese sales method for mobile phones.

Although the price you pay for your new mobile phone in Japan is rarely more than 10,000 yen, the cost of that handset is quite often 50,000 yen or more. The average subsidy for your mobile in fact ranges from 30,000 to as much as 60,000 yen depending on the size of the production lot. (Which also explains why mobile phones cost $400 or so in the West!). So who pays these generous subsidies to us? None other than the carriers themselves. DoCoMo is happy to subsidize your handset purchase by 30,000 yen or more, because they assume you will use it for at least 5 months (at an average bill of 6,000 yen per month they can cover their costs). For this reason, they clearly don’t want to make it possible for you to use that treasured phone with Au or Softbank Mobile! To put this in context, NTT DoCoMo is planning to spend over $18 billion USD on handset related subsidies this year. Ouch.

Before the implementation of MNP, there was some debate (mainly promoted by Nokia and a few other foreign handset makers) that Japanese carriers should remove the Sim-lock that prevents you from using the same phone with another carrier. Needless to say (as this would encourage you to sign up with the carrier with the biggest subsidy and then change to the carrier with the cheapest rates a month later) this debate died a quick death.

Even in a post-MNP world, you will not be able to reregister your handset with another carrier; but next time you are seriously considering buying a new handset, you will be able to confidently chose a sexier handset from another company without the fear of losing your phone number. (NB. You will, unfortunately, lose your mobile email address.)
Increasing churn between carriers is a costly excercise for the carriers and so most people in the industry are assuming (= hoping) that MNP will be a non-event. In fact they have good reason to, as it has been a non-event in nearly every other country that has ever introduced the system. Wikipedia has a great chart on its Japanese language MNP page that shows the % of users that actually used MNP in various countries overseas. With the exception of Hong Kong’s 85%, nearly every other country in the world was below 15% (Australia 9%, England 5%, Italy 2%, Korea 1%). What most of these industrial commentators fail to point out is that none of these countries really tried to make it work. Perhaps it was due to the lack of technology “back in the day” but nearly every one of these countries required you to wait between 1-4 weeks (Yes! Weeks!) without a phone number as you transferred carriers. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound so attractive to me.

So what is MNP going to be like in Japan? Surprisingly for the MIAC (総務省) , the MNP system in Japan is actually quite user friendly. The entire process is expected to take about 30 minutes and cost you slightly less than 3,000 yen. When you consider that upgrading to a new handset model at your existing provider (機種変更) is likely to take just as long and cost you 3,000 yen, it does appear as though the barriers to MNP taking off are quite low. In fact, you don’t even have to visit your old carrier’s store: The entire process can be completed by telephone from the store where you purchase your new, cooler, phone.

This week’s Nikkei Business (Oct 16) has published an interesting survey on page 147 about expected MNP usage. The author suggests that as little as 2% of existing users are going to use MNP. Stippy.com has its money on this number being more than a little conservative. While we expect the advertising battle to heat up in the next few weeks, here is our favorite commercial so far this Autumn…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you on top of all of the latest models being released now? Remember in Japan, a phone is not a tool, it is a toy!

The Blackberry, the ubiquitous tool that has become a fixture in the hands of the white-collar executive in North America and Europe will finally gain a foothold in the Japanese market. NTT DoCoMo is partnering with Canadian Blackberry-maker RIM (Research in Motion) to offer customers GSM/WCMDA “worldphone” versions of the handhelds.

Now as a Canadian I can’t help but feel a bit of patriotic pride to hear that Canada’s greatest contribution to the consumer electronics market is trying to find a place among the tech-savvy, communication loving Japanese. But what remains to be seen is if the Blackberry is going to find a receptive home in Japan and even if it does would this really be a good thing?

I’m not exactly a technophobe but I must confess that gadgets, especially those portable lightweight gadgets that can easily be dropped into puddles, sinks, toilets and other bodies of water and I have never had the smoothest of relationships. Pagers, cell phones, PDAs and lap tops in my possession have inevitably been dropped into or doused with beer, juice, water, coffee, sodas of all variety, soy sauce, tonkatsu sauce, nuoc mam, and most unfortunately milk. (If you’ve never had the experience of walking into a computer store with a sticky laptop that has a distinct curdled smell to see if you can get a temporary replacement computer while they go through the process of de-lactising the machine as they are bound to do under their obviously generous warranty program, then you should count yourself one of the fortunate.)

I suppose I could simply own up to the fact that I appear to be a little bit of a slob and that I shouldn’t be operating these handhelds while eating or drinking but I choose to point my finger of blame elsewhere. The reason these tools inevitably find their way into food and drink is that they are with me throughout the day, during office hours and beyond.

The image of the mobile businessman able to access data, send email and stay in touch with the office no matter where they are and regardless of the hour is a particularly North American conceit and not necessarily one reflected in reality. From my own experience these electronic communication gadgets are more akin to those anklets that people under house arrest are forced to wear so that your position can constantly be monitored. It’s not for the executive on the go so much as for the lowly salaryman who is going to get a pile of work dumped on them at all hours of the day. For some industries and situations I can definitely see the advantage in having access to the Internet and the office readily available in the palm of your hand but generally speaking I would have to question if there are really emergency requirements that would necessitate being on call constantly.

Despite the highly developed telecommunication system in Japan there is still a great deal of business actually conducted through face-to-face meetings rather than emails and conference calls. Sure, you see the cell phones on the streets, friends texting one another and wireless service is available in most locations but the human element still remains. It’s nice to have a respite from the constant calls, emails and demand on one’s time. I’m hoping that there can remain some sort of demarcation between work and the personal realm even if technology continues to blur the line.

But ultimately I’m unconvinced that it’s going to be the Blackberry that will make it in Japan, changing the nature of business and permeating society. Given that there is already a prevalence of sleek, lightweight gadgets in Japan every bit as convenient as the North American models I’m interested to see if the appearance of the Blackberry will have any effect on the way that business is conducted in Japan.

I‘m not much of an auto guy, but I’m a real sucker for gadgets and the new Lexus has me excited. Toyota released their latest Lexus in Japan at the start of this week and it is amazingly different from any car that has come before. Japanese autos are becoming more and more high-tech and closer and closer to being a computer on wheels. The flagship vehicle for the new Lexus is the LS460. This car is said to have over 7 million lines of code programmed inside (and that is not including the car-navi software!) That is about as much as you’d find inside an aeroplane and controls everything from breaking and steering to temperature and “inflight” comfort. To put that into context, the average Toyota car has about 4 million lines of code.
You can check out some photos of the LS460 on its website but let me give you a run down to some of the cooler functions. When you want to park your car, the Lexus uses sonar to detect the vehicles already parked on the side of the road. By pressing the “parallel parking” button, the car will automatically maneuver your car into the parking space. While I wouldn’t experiment with this when you’re parked next to a Merc, it does sound like pretty practical functionability.

While there has been a lot of Japanese press recently about Toyota designing a car which detects your blood alchohol levels and shuts the car down if the driver is drunk, this one focuses on slightly more “techy” safety features. The inbuilt camera on the steering wheel detects when the driver isn’t looking at the road. The car is constantly monitoring the road in front of you with millimeter wave radar and if it looks like you might potentially crash, it not only flashes a light and sounds a siren, it slows your speed and increases the sensitivity of the steering circle to ease your escape from danger. At the same time, it also adjusts the head rest so that it is positioned directly behind the driver’s head to reduce any potential backlash in the collision.
Besides this doing wonders for lowering the mortality rate on the roads, this will be great for Japanese tech companies. These days all of the focus seems to be on the impact that the digitalization of television/broadcasting will have on Japanese tech makers but it is starting to feel like the increasing digitalization of autos could be even more exciting. The arrival of the hybrid could be just as important as the LCD has been for Japan’s component manufacturers. Yet another reason to stay bullish about the Japanese economy in the long-term. Hazzard a guess as to the total number of motors in the new Lexus. (Hint: the answer is a lot more than that big one that you are thinking about).
If you want a new Lexus, you better be fast. Apparently Toyota had received orders for over 9,000 cars even before the Lexus was released. (Not bad given that the company had only expected to manufacture 10,000 of them this year.)

Akihabara News is the only (English) website that I know of the continuously covers new developments in the Japanese electronic/gadget market.

If you are thinking of visiting Japan, or already live in Tokyo, then check them out. There are some really amazing bargains, and some just plain bizzare stories about “gadgets in Japan”… And who of us doesn’t like our gadgets..? Click on the image to take you there.

(“Akihabara” is the electronics town, that almost every foreign visitor feels sucked to upon a visit to Tokyo..)