DoCoMo bringing BlackBerry to Japan
By Evan Blass 
posted June 8th 2006 12:14PM
posted June 8th 2006 12:14PM
Having already conquered the US and much of Europe, Canada's most famous contribution to consumer electronics is poised to take over yet another Asian market, when the ubiquitous BlackBerry hits phone-mad Japan this fall. Coming hot on the heels of KT Powertel's introduction of the 7100i in South Korea, wireless giant NTT DoCoMo has announced that it is partnering with BlackBerry-maker RIM to offer customers GSM / WCMDA "worldphone" versions of the addictive handhelds -- which is yet another step towards the carrier's commitment of having an all-GSM-enabled lineup within the next two years. Besides the traditional push email functionality that we've come to know and love, nothing is known about the specifics of these upcoming foreign models, like how the pocket-sized BlackBerries will manage to pack in the thousands of keys necessary to represent all those Japanese glyphs.[Thanks, Gina]
Here is a nice free Japanese - English dictionary for the Blackberry www.bbJisyo.com
Good example sentences and supports kanji input.
"like how the pocket-sized BlackBerries will manage to pack in the thousands of keys necessary to represent all those Japanese glyphs."
Probably the same way they're represented on every other keyboard...
The Japanese use regular English keyboards. There is usually a Japanese "mode" on these keyboards, but nobody uses it because it's actually harder - they just type with Roman letters and select the words they want from a list.
Anyway, I can't see how these will be a success in Japan, where they have way more advanced devices already.
Why would any Japanese user want this, when all the Japanese carriers already offer push email service? Just because it allows a single phone to roam world wide?
Jeff's right... in fact, it's actually easier and faster to enter Japanese on a 12 key phone keypad than English, I've found, because of the way the phoneme system is set up. Some Japanese kids can enter text messages faster than they can talk.
It'll be interesting to see if the push email is enough to sell these machines in a country where a lot of people use their cell phone email address as their primary email, but I'm sure Docomo and RIM have something cooked up.
Most of the high-end (and many lower-end phones) in Japan already support global roaming. The above users are right. On PCs, text is usually entered in Roman letters, and on phones, text is also entered phonetically using the Japanese "alphabet". It's at least as fast as typing on a Western phone (actually, probably faster). If any people are capable of emailing practically from a cell phone, it's the Japanese...
I don't really know why they're pushing this phone (no pun intended) there. Aside from what was mentioned above, the Japanese cell phone market is dominated by flip-phones, with an occasional exception.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that this product can make like Cheap Trick, and do well in Japan. At least it should do better than the Moto M-1000 or Nokia 6630 variant that Docomo aleady carries. Personally, I think that with the right marketing this could actually become a hit.
There is nothing really like BB connect in Japan, and even POP and IMAP clients are uncommon on Japanese cellphones. So virtually all Japanese mobile phone users are limited to their cell phone provider's keitai mail service. That may not sound limiting, but it can be in some situations. Times are a changing though. Willcom is including a POP/IMAP email client on most of their phones, not just the W-Zero3, and Vodafone is prepping their analog of the Black Berry Connect service. That Vodafone service will probably go live when they release the Nokia E60 and E61 this summer. Given the typically long commute times in Japan, it's more surprising to me that a phone like this hasn't been released here, as opposed to this being one of the first.
As for the form factor, there are plenty of candybar and slider phones on the market here to make that a non-issue. And you could be about as fast as most Japanese in sending an email on your cell phone, if (a) you've been practicing it since you were 6 years old, (b) had your T9 predictive text configured with a large dictionary of words and phrases, and (c) had a library of stock phrases that you could easily copy/paste from.
Yawn... Have a look in any Japan phone shop and you'll see that this is like entering a minivan in a sportscar race.
I always knew we were far behind Japan in technology, but I couldn't believe how far until I came here. The Blackberry is archaic compared to phones, their use, and their prices here. It might find a novel market, but I don't expect a minivan to find many supporters from a culture obsessed with small and cute.
Japan is often ahead of the U.S. in technology. But at times, they are ahead in useless technology.
Japanese phones are great entertainment devices, but they fail by a long shot at being serious business devices in today's information age, and the Blackberry will fill that void. Afterall this device is going to be marketed squarely as a business solution phone. There's a reason that the W-Zero3 for Willcom sold 150k units in about 6 months time, because there is a demand for this and currently no other carrier actually bothered to satisfy this demand.
Japanese teenagers can type emails on their phone fast only because they, like every other countries' youth, type in shorthands and broken speech patterns (think "wat r u up 2?" type of speech), and if you do that in a business situation you sure won't impress many clients. Polite and honorific speech patterns in Japanese is long and tedious, heck I even hate typing up a Japanese email on a full-size keyboard on my PC, and I can't for the life of me imagine doing it on a mobile phone even with predictive input.
Most Japanese phones don't actually support global roaming, especially not DoCoMo phones. Only Vodafone (now Softbank) actually has a decent line-up of quadband GSM/WCDMA phones. DoCoMo's GSM-capable lineup can be counted in one hand, and frankly they are all cheaply made and horribly designed.
I didn't know the BlackBerry is from Canada. It shows what tremendous contributions our Northern neighbors had given us over the years without most of us knowing; John Candy, Pamela Anderson and the BlackBerry., Good for the Maple leaf country!
Maybe the sole reason the Japanese want it, it's because America's favorite harlot, Miss. Paris Hilton made it even more popular during the infamous hack?
Has anyone pointed out that the word "DoCoMo" sounds uncomfortably close to the Korean word for sphincter?
I disagree with some comments here promoting Japanese technology as being a far advanced. Japanese phones are certainly more advanced than typical American phones from Motorola and other manufactures.
For business applications, however, typical Japanese models do not and cannot hold a candle to the Blackberry and similar counterparts found in Canada and the US. Japanese handheld models are toys in comparison, with extremely limited functionality. (Details: One cannot read simple word attachments in email, cannot access websites outside of the dedicated carrier's scope, cannot access you own schedule while speaking with another party, etc., all basic functions on Blackberry, I believe).
As a technology recruiter in Tokyo, I have many discussions with phone engineers who point out that many Japanese business people are waiting for the Blackberry device, or related spawn, with its large screen, enlarged key entry system, and software for viewing Office files have only been very recently introduced through the Opera browser on recent 2006 models.
Phones in Japan are advanced in terms of advanced megapixel cameras, and email (SMS) between phones, and purchasing items through assigned mobile-applications, but the Far East is Far Behind the distinctly American 'Blackberry phenomenon' and culture of extreme practicality and functionality associated with it.
As an aside, I was speaking with a guy who bought a US Blackberry model to Japan and used it for making daily domestic calls - USING SKYPE! Ingenious. This was about 2 years ago. I never followed up on it to have show me, but that's what he said. I wonder if that is viable alternative to the Japanese Blackberry search. Moreover, it seems that its only available to corporate users at Goldman/Lehman and other Roppongi Hills finance suits.
I would like to know if Skype operates on Blackberry?