vendredi 27 février 2009

Japatech: the cell phones

In Yamaguchi there is a long arcade mall with plenty of interesting shops. In that mall, hiding over a drugstore is one of the nicest café I’ve been to (even in Québec)!
You’d miss the entrance – and its part of what I like about it: You have to know it exists to go there. The narrow staircase leads to a western wooden door; the ones that open to outside, except we're already inside! The café itself is a mix of western styles; the walls and tables have a cool Scandinavian feel to them, while you can sit on French and English style couches/sofas. There is this feeling I get when entering a place that wants to look western in Japan, but the many design, art and decoration magazines available to read there tell me that the owners actually wanted to mix the styles. I love it! The menu includes Japanese and western foods as well as a varierity of drinks. And they play jazz music! And the coffee is actually good (I must tell you my friends, good coffee is no common thing in Japan)! But most of all, they have wireless internet!!!

Did you think that Japan was the land of technology? That every regular Japanese person had a computer? That you might get the internet even in the middle of the forest??
NO! Wireless internet is not in any restaurant or café and most families have a single computer for the whole household, if not at all. How come?!
The answer is: cell phones.
The Japanese cell phones are monsters / wonders of miniaturisation. With a Japanese cell phone you can:

- Text, and include smilies (from a selection of about 2000), animated backgrounds of hearts twirling around and happy suns and other really really cute stuff;
-Have your whole agenda on it; with alarms for important events, birthdays and so on;
- Access Internet and you regular email account, watch videos online, upload and download files;
- Take high resolution pictures;
- Listen to your music like it was an MP3 player;
- Watch your videos and clips like it was a MP4 player;
- Watch TV;
- Call I guess, although I don’t recall seeing a Japanese person actually calling: it’s impolite in public anyways.


From Docomo, Japan's biggest cell phone company.

Most of my friends at the university started to use a cell phone around 14 – and nowadays kids are given cell phones around 10!
There are many Japanese websites expressively made for people using cell phones. For exemple, a trendy thing to do is writing stories from your phone directly to a specialised website. Some popular stories even get published / become a movie, a manga or an anime!
Crazy.
In the meantime, I am sad not having internet at the residences, and my cell phone not having an internet contract. 。+ (ノД`)・゜・。


By the way, have some finish music and click "Husky Rescue" in the Sweet Playlists category ! You can also find them on Myspace. Love it love it love it. Wanna go to Finland now. It's my fisnish roommate Tanya's fault. She's the devil.

4 commentaires:

Anonyme a dit…

sans vouloir t'offencer .... mon cell fait tout ça lol en plus dêtre tactile :P

Dominique DP a dit…

Jay t'es pas un québécois moyen en fait de technologie!! Maudit zouneux.
C'est quoi ton cellulaire?

Kunoichi a dit…

Pwahaha! Le mien fait rien de tout ça, mais je peux téléphonner!!

Bon ok, je sors...

Ti a dit…

Ataboy! C'est pas la "grande" technologie, mais plutôt la "mignature" ... lol m'enfin c'est asser impressionnant, c'est tout le contraire ici où le cell est la pour juste appeler en cas de besoin. Sinon ca fini par couter un bras!