I picked up a new cellular phone the other day, and it's a bloody amazing thing. Never mind that it's more powerful than the average computer a decade ago, it's jam-packed with unreasonably astonishing fun stuff.
[Update June 30 2004]
256k Appli Gallery
I'm stunned.
Let's start off with the normal stuff. It has a 240x320 screen, a 2-megapixel camera, and an SD-card slot for easy PC-phone file transfers.
[the screen]
The screen as mentioned above is equal to most every pre-playstation console and most early computers. It does over 200,000 colours onscreen. There's a second smaller screen that's visible when the phone's closed. Interestingly the phone does
sub-pixel font smoothing, which makes for some very smooth fonts and an effective text resolution of 720x320. Amazing, really.
[the camera]
The 2-megapixel camera is pretty remarkable for its size. This entire phone is smaller, by far, than the
camera I was using as my primary camera until October last year, with the same pixel count and very similar image quality. It has three image quality settings, though in testing I cannot tell the difference between the three. Filesizes range from 200-600k per image at max size. The only thing it lacks is a flash. It has far, far more features than your standard digital camera, and it's a free bonus with the phone.
Sample image (full rez)
It has astonishing photo-editing abilities, including frivolous things like cutesy frames and overlays, mirror and lighing effects, strange facial editing features (make a face smile, frown, darken, be angry, etc), and the ability to wrap an image around a soda-can. Included also are very useful things, like text labels on the image itself, including such information as time, date, comment or location (see below). You can rotate it, add special effects like bubbles, light sparkles, sepia, kaleidoscope, emboss, scrunch and several fading frames. You can also add markers, to point out certain features.
So you can take a picture of your friend, put a fake wig on them, add a marker pointing to their misshapen nose with a humorous label, add sparkles off their greasy face, make 'em happier than they really are, sepia-tone the image then wrap it on a soda can. On a goddamned phone.
[gallery]
It also does other things, see below.
[interesting stuff]
The phone can tell you where you are. It doesn't have a GPS built in, but each cellular antenna in the country has a unique identification which the phone will happily tell you. It keeps a daily log, so you can see where you've been. Kuki-shi North, is where I was at 12:47 this afternoon. I can cut this info as a chunk of text and use it in skymails (like SMS), emails, labels on an image, filenames, whatever.
It plays MP3s, but you have to purchase an expensive software package to do it, and it comes with (I'm sure) some restrictive DRM, so no surprise to anyone I'm not going to bother. The SD cardslot allows me to more easily put large files into it, and using
Yamaha's SMAF tools I can convert short .wav files into the .mmf format which the phone can use for effects and ringtones. Different ringtones for everyone I know, baby. The sweet sounds of PacMan or DigDug now accompany every email or call I get. This is a nice way to avoid paying the exorbitant packet and subscription fees Namco asks to DL gametunes. On the other hand their tunes are generated by the onboard synth instead of using sampled sounds, so theirs are a lot clearer...
The UI is clear, but the option screens are somewhat spread out and not as intuitive as
my old phone. It doesn't allow me to add sounds for some events, like opening or closing the clamshell, which makes me sad. Also the camera, when activated, has a loud sound you can't turn off. This is to prevent upskirt photography, and I applaud its use, but really I think it's handy to be able to choose my own sound (I'm offered 3 pre-chosen sounds only) or turn it off. I'm prolly gonna put a speaker-killswitch inside, so I can ... uh... be stealthy. 'cause that's important. Moving on...
It has TV output via a stereo AV cable, though this is largely useless as the only things shown are photos (and only when specifically activated) and Java games - but only the ones that support the feature, of which there are approximately one available so far. Even when showing off photos, which is keen and all, it uses about a quarter of the screen and cannot be expanded. I put the cable back in the box and don't expect to use it again.
[weird + amazing]
The camera can be used as a barcode scanner, reading both
UPC codes and the 2-dimensional
QR codes. It can also create them; you can instantly turn any bit of text, including names, emails, phone numbers and URLs into a QR code. You can then export this via email or the SD card, and print the resulting image anywhere you like (or even read it off the computer screen!). These little codes are fairly common on advertising flyers and posters in Japan. They allow the customer to quickly and easily point the camera at the code and instantly have access to the name of the salesman, a phone number, web page address and whatever else. It's really a neat gimmick, though with the more convenient use of RFID chips I expect this will be a short-lived phenomenon.
[QR Codes]
It can also read normal text, which I find totally amazing. Point it at any bit of text on a page, like an URL or headline or email address or basically anything and it will scan the text and copy it to the buffer where you can jump to the URL, send an email or whatever. Much quicker than typing it in. It only reads Roman (ie English) text, but it's proven to be 100% accurate for black/white text.
[games]
It also plays games. It can play 3D Java games like
Rage Racer and
StarBlade Alpha (
wow!). It can play applis up to 256 in size, and in QVGA (240x320) resolutions, like
Raiden and countless others.
Sadly most of the big publishers are moving to a model where the appli contacts the main server, ostensibly to check for updates, every few runs. This means the games are effectively locked to Japan, since if you leave the country you can't use the network anymore. This also means you pay for packet traffic every time this happens (which can be EXTREMELY expensive), albeit in very small increments in this case. I'll be supporting the smaller publishers like
Success and
G-Mode instead of Namco, Capcom, Taito and Konami. Fuck them, they got my money and now they want to tell me how often and where I can play? This is what DRM is all about kids, it's
fucking evil.
[the cost]
The total cost for this phone? Nothing. $zero. Not a dime. I had to subscribe to some program or another for a month at a cost of two bucks or so, but beyond that the phone was totally free for a new account. This means I have a new phone number, which doesn't bother me a whit. I could have kept the number for a $100 fee (since I didn't own the old phone for 2 years yet) but screw it, no one phones me anyway, I get all my contacts through email. All hail Vodafone. While we're hailing things, let's hail restrictive and arbitrary regional lockouts that prevent me from using this phone anywhere but Japan.
It's a good phone. I love Japan. =)
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