1. I have no doubt that SMS exists, actually, it’s just that in my experience so few people use it that it might as well not. The fact that every phone in this country comes with an email address that can be used to contact all other addresses–not just those tied to phones, like SMS–has made that whole system pretty much dead to the Japanese mobile communicating public, I think.

2. I haven’t seen a real live iPhone in its present incarnation so I’m not sure about this one. The SoftBank S! plans come with an address that I believe you access directly through the phone’s software, not by firing up a Yahoo webmail interface, so that might be a part of the deal here. (It might be what you access through the Mail.app included in the iPhone OS X too, though.) If I do end up with one of these things I’ll be using webmail for my gol.com and work and gmail.com accounts, I imagine, rather than hooking them all into the onboard app.

3. This is something I haven’t heard a bit about . . . Working those extra icons into the mix isn’t particularly challenging from a technical standpoint (there are Unicode and S-JIS codes for the things that you can see on NTT’s site for example) but it remains to be seen whether Apple stuck the functionality into the OS on the iPhone.

Thanks for stopping by!

1. What do you mean by SMS not existing? I use it all the time on my Softbank phone.

2. Depending on the answer to (1), do you think we will have to do all our messaging using Mail.app instead of the SMS app?

3. Any idea if emoji will work?