Japanese [Joi Ito] My F900iC

I spilled juice on my phone and had to get a new one. I got a F900iC. It's the first 3G phone with the new FeliCa contactless IC card built in. I just set up my Edy account and downloaded 10,000 yen to it from my credit card. I think they will let you get money from your bank as well. I can wave it at the garage machine at Tokyo station, or at the cash register at AM/PMs or in a bunch of places inside of the Marunouchi building where I'm hanging out a lot lately. Not sure how nationally rolled out it is. Edy is a e-money system spearheaded by Sony and NTT-Docomo. (Some people joke that "Edy" sounds like a play on "Idei" the Chairman of Sony.) I used to carry an Edy card around with me, but the biggest problem was that I had to go to "charging stations" to put cash into it, and I couldn't check how much money I had left. Now I can see how much money I have and download more money on the phone. Yay! Also, this mobile wallet of mine allows me to create accounts with other systems like Suica. Suica has not yet launched on the phone, but will soon. Suica is run by JR. This Felica system uses a different technology than the contactless IC card that the government was pushing for the national ID system. This is good news to me. I idea of having a bunch of different ID cards from one machine, all issued by different commercial vendors sounds better from a privacy perspective that having vendors use your national ID card for digital cash.

My phone also has a nifty fingerprint thing that actually works. It's really fast. To access secure features, instead of punching a pin, I just swipe my finger across a fingerprint pad. It also has the standard 2 screens, 2 cameras, mini SD and a QVGA TFT display.

As a side note, I noticed that when I turned on my Nokia 7600 the other day, both J-Phone and Docomo showed up as available networks. I was able to send and receive SMSs internationally using my US T-Mobile SIM card in my Nokia while in Japan. Some SMSs took days to get to me so it's not perfect yet, but what a change! We have a multi-operator 3G network that allows foreign SIMs and phones! It looks like I have SMS on my Docomo Foma phone, but I can't seem to figure out what I can send international SMSs. Does anyone know how to do or if I can do this?

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