Matthew Skyrm’s .Plan in Japan

Captcha is the fancy name used for those distorted images of text that you must type when signing up for things on the web. The other day I was signing up on Japanese online video sharing site fc2.com (don’t ask me why!) and noticed a completely different type of Captcha being used.

Captcha used in fc2.com

Basically the image is spelling out a series of numbers that the user has to type in. Luckily it is in Hiragana (which I can read) and it is all numbers. This one reads 807355. On the one hand, I find this approach rather novel as it poses yet another strong obstacle against evil sign-up bots and their masters, on the other hand it is yet another example of something that is totally specific to the Japanese market and can’t be used anywhere else without modification.

Before moving back to Tokyo in October I was using an iPhone as my primary mobile phone. The iPhone’s resolution is 480×320 and 3.5 inches in size diagonally. That’s 153,600 pixels. Man, the screen is so nice.

153,600 pixels of love

So, it was reasonable for me to assume an even better experience from my new Toshiba 911T, one of the only full-featured phones available in Japan to have both English T9 and a 3-inch “WVGA” display which is a whopping 800×480 resolution. That’s 384,000 pixels — well over twice the iPhone’s resolution.

384,000 wasted pixels

Well, you know what happens when you assume. Yes, the 800×480 display is insanely crisp when viewing photos — that can’t be debated. However, everything else — text, video, one-seg TV, menu graphics, etcetera, just lack the smoothness and crispness which seems so effortless on the iPhone. As is often the case with hardware these days — it all comes down to great software.

The iPhone is scaling and smoothing its beautiful fonts while the Toshiba looks pixelated and sometimes even worse than the older QVGA (320×240) displays that were once the standard in Japan. Further, there are no high resolution icons or other aspects of the interface to take advantage of this magnificent display. Even the “PC Browser” — a browser for viewing web sites which were designed for PC web browsers — is inferior to iPhone’s Safari in terms of font readability. Besides the great quality when viewing photos, about the only positive thing I can say is that if I did want to view super tiny and almost unreadable text on a mobile phone I would have the option available to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I really like this phone. It’s got UMTS HSDPA, FeliCa RFID, a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, takes great videos, has English T9 input, one-seg TV, a micro-SD port, syncs with iSync (Thanks to the gods at Reudo!) and a lot more — even Bluetooth A2DP (though rather useless without MP3 playback). But, it’s no iPhone.

Once the iPhone comes out in Japan, I wonder if the average Japanese customer will even care about this issue. I have shown Japanese Windows users the amazing quality of the Japanese fonts on my Mac many times and most seem to be either oblivious or ambivalent. I can’t explain it. See for yourself:

Windows - Hurts my eyes


Mac OS X - Feels so much better

I’m looking forward to enjoying great readability here in Japan once the iPhone arrives or someone else picks up the torch — hopefully Sony Ericsson.

Goodbye, for now!

Hello, again!

Apologies to my readers for the lack of activity recently. I had a death in my immediate family in July that naturally put the blog on low priority. I now have some major updates to share…

After a fantastic nearly 2 years I have decided to leave Yahoo! and will no longer be running the Y! Messenger client products. I am returning to Tokyo to work at Sony alongside my great friend Takeshi Honma. We’ve got plenty of things planned that I will post about here at a later date.

In between jobs I am vacationing again in Turkey and will also be stopping by France and Germany for a week to see family and friends. My very close friend Baris and his family are hosting us here in Turkey.

I’m writing this from my trusty 12″ PowerBook G4 connected to a Turk Telekom 1 megabit ADSL line which Speakeasy to SF seems to think gets about 200 kbps down and 81 kbps up, however I was able to achieve over 800 kbps down on a download from Europe. I’ve also got another Turkcell SIM card which I’ll be posting a definitive guide to later on.

While I mainly use Macs at home and work, I believe that Sony makes the best Windows personal computers. They are beautiful and innovative. IDG takes a brief look back at 10 years of VAIO.

According to my bro Takashi, Windows 95 was profoundly important in spurring personal computer adoption in Japan. So I’m really glad the article covered the importance of Windows 95 in Japan.

Many homes in Japan didn’t have a PC at the time. They relied instead on dedicated word processing machines that fell somewhere between electric typewriters and laptop computers. But the launch of Windows 95 helped expand the PC market in Japan, in part by offering an interface more friendly to Japanese users.

While they got the Vaio 505 for its thin and elegant design, the MPEG encoder card in the first desktops, and the inclusion of iLink (i.e. Firewire i.e. IEEE 1394) — they neglected to mention the first integration of a webcam into a notebook, the inclusion of a memory stick reader in most models, and other things now common in competitors’ models.

Sony VAIO PCG-C1VN PictureBook — Circa 2001