Handset price: ¥23,040 for 8GB, ¥34,560 for 16GB (paid in ¥960 or ¥1,440 monthly payments over the course of the two-year plan).

Service price: ¥7,280 a month (including the ¥980 White Plan, which includes free calls from 1 a.m. to 9 p.m. to other SoftBank numbers; the fixed-price [unmetered?] data plan for ¥5,985; and the S! Basic Pack, which costs ¥315 and isn’t really described on that page).

Not a horrible deal, all in all, considering what was being predicted for this thing. Still, if you do a lot of telephoning the charges will stack up quickly: SoftBank gives you a great deal on calls to other SoftBank users, but makes you fork over north of ¥20 per minute to all other mobile and fixed-line numbers. Email is free to and from all addresses (you get an @i.softbank.jp address with the thing, but of course you can use all your webmail as usual) and SMS doesn’t exist in this country.

Now to decide whether I really want to ditch the DoCoMo set and jump into the Apple end of the mobile phone pool . . .

ShareThis

DoCoMo has admitted to TechRadar it tried and failed to strike a deal with Apple to sell the 3G iPhone in Japan. . . .

[Ichikoshi Shûichirô says] “Anyway, DoCoMo already sells touchscreen phones, such as the Prada phone and the SH906i, which came out yesterday.”

I saw one of those Prada phones in Yodobashi the other day. Not a bad looking thing, in its iPhonish way, but it markets for more than ninety freaking thousand yen. Yeah. Good luck with that.

ShareThis

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.

(Seriously, that’s the entire press release; you don’t really have to go read it now.)

I’m happy to see the thing on its way to Japan at last. I’m thinking about making it my next cellphone—not for its great wifi action, since free wifi isn’t a common thing to find in this city in my experience, but because it’s the first phone ever that I can be sure will sync up nicely with my Mac computers.

What Japan Thinks has a good post up here on the iPhone and its prospects in this market. The piece is almost a year old but is worth looking at just the same.

ShareThis

A few quick links to things I wrote on that other site:

One, two, three . . . (on Ryan Ginstrom’s online and downloadable word-and-character-counting utilities)

Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money (on, well, Facebook and the translation of its interface)

Guerrilla editing on the road (on the wild adventures of the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League)

In the “life” category:

Sakura is an active, active girl. She gets us up anywhere from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning, and when she is up it’s definitely time for us all to be awake, feeding her and playing with her and reading her books. She loves to spend time outside, which will be a challenge to deal with once the summer heat hits in earnest. Putting shoes on is the sign that it’s time to visit the great outdoors, and shoes are therefore among her favorite things these days.

In the “work” category:

Japan Echo lost in the bidding for a Cabinet Office publication that would have meant an extra 50 pages or so of translation and layout each month. Mixed feelings here: the job would have helped the company’s bottom line, but it would have been a brutal pace at which to write and edit, and bureaucrats in the central government aren’t known for their appreciation of finely crafted phrases. We would have had to take on more help for the project and we wouldn’t have enjoyed much of it. So . . . whew?

In place of that it looks like we’ll be busy in July, at least, doing on-site work at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. Eight years ago I went to Miyazaki and Okinawa for the G8 foreign ministers’ and leaders’ meetings. Sat in tiny, insufficiently air-conditioned rooms and translated or proofed little blurbs of text to go out on the media info system. The work should be the same this time around, more or less, but a full eight-year cycle in the G8 process brings with it a whole lot of technological advances in the meantime, so I don’t think my dim memories of how to key the press releases in that old system will help much with whatever Hakuhodo sets up this time around. Prep meetings begin next week. We’ll see.

ShareThis

ShareThis

ShareThis

• It will focus my attention on thinking about the work that I do and writing something readable about it
• I can then repurpose that content, bringing it back here and further improving it so this place will sparkle and shine
• It will, um, make me famous and rich, somehow, I’m sure
• It means that right now, you like me!

So anyway, that’s that. I am about to grab a bite to eat and then hit the sack. This three-day work week is killing me. Hope the four-day weekend will be enough time to recover. Hail Golden Week!

Crap I just finished going through the rigamarole of updating to WP 2.5 and already 2.5.1 is available? Bah. March of progress? Bah.

ShareThis

A few coming up that I’m interested in seeing are There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy (thanks to James for cluing me in to him many years ago). I must admit this is my least favorite of his books—with the possible exception of The Sunset Limited (Amazon page), but I haven’t gotten to that one yet, so no ranking there. But I’m interested to see what happens when this makes it to the screen in the hands of the actors and directors involved with this project.

(I never saw the 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, but I’ve never seen reviews of it that made me feel like I was missing out. Would be nice to see someone in Hollywood approach the entire Border Trilogy in a serious fashion.)

McCarthy’s page at IMDB says that not only The Road but Blood Meridian and Outer Dark are also in production now. I wonder about the possibility of doing a good transition to the screen with those two—particularly Blood Meridian, which features massive violence and supernaturally intelligent bald giants and such. However, Ridley Scott is listed as the director for it, so maybe there’s a chance we’ll see a compelling Judge Holden on our movie screens. For me, on my TV six months later.

Good information on Cormac McCarthy is available at this site.

ShareThis

More than that, though, I was tired of never being able to log in. This hosting company isn’t the best I could have chosen. Time to look into new digs for durf.org, I think.

Work remains busy. Baby remains adorable. Last night I had a quick drink or three with Jed the brave JAT webperson. He showed me his MacBook Air and the translation software he’s working on: langwidget. (LangWidget? He studiously avoids the shift key on that site so it’s hard to tell.) Looked very slick—it works in a browser and lets translators share their translation units (pairs of words or phrases for source and target languages) with the other folks using the software, using the Internet and data clouds and magic and so on. Not exactly the sort of product I could put to good use in my unpredictable, nonrepetitive work, but for many kinds of translation these tools are indeed helpful and his may one day be a nice, platform-agnostic addition to their number.

ShareThis

Taken at Jindaiji in the late nineteenth century. Not. Actually it was taken at Jindaiji a few years ago (the original is here) and run through this cool online “old photo generator” called the 幕末古写真ジェネレーター (Bakumatsu old photo generator). Perfect for making your shots of Kabukicho neon last weekend look like they belong in an Isabella Bird book.

(Hat tip to Asiajin for this one.)

ShareThis