First hand review of the new FOMA handsets....
3gnewsroom.com
Hey,
I just thought it would be a nice change for this forum to see what's happening in Japan.
I happened to be in Fukuoka last weekend so I got my first hands-on use of the new FOMA phones (the 900i series) at a FOMA showroom.(I just want to say that I'm an AU customer.)
My likes:
1) Battery life: The phones have up to 500 hours standby time. Ok, manufacturers always overstate this but it's still an amazing amount. My A5503SA has a max standy time of 200 hours. In FOMA ads that I"ve seen, this is one of the major points DoCoMo seem to be stressing.
2) The amount of features are very good. Video telephony is nice. On display was a phone which was having a video-call with another phone. It looked really cool. The new iApplis were also impressive. The game selection seemed very nice ;-) The flash-enabled iMode main page (the english iMode main screen is not flash-enabled) looks so great. It really impressed me. It looked like a mini-browser, not a mobile phone webpage.
3) The phones have no external antennae. Coming from phones in Europe which had none, the fact that nearly all phones here have one really bugs me. They are just so awkward. Congrats to DoCoMo and the manufacturers for trying to get rid of them.
4) Unlike AU, all the phones are bilingual. AU really have a terrible selection of such phones.
Dislikes:
1) Screen: This was the thing which surprised me. The menu screens looked so old (fashioned) and so made the screen seem to be of very low quality. It's hard to explain really. My old A5402S had the same problem. Although it had a QVGA screen, the quality looked really poor. For such advanced phones I'm quite surprised at this. The menus weren't very pretty either.
2) Build quality: Both the F900i and the N900i felt like cheap toy phones. I was almost horrified by the feel of the F900i. If I paid over 30,000yen (the average price of the phones) then I would expect something much less "plastiky". The P900i felt a lot better, but it did feel very rectangular. It was almost like a deck of cards - sharp edges.
3) Price: They are currently expensive. ABout 30,000 yen. OK, for European customers and maybe Americans (I'm not sure about prices there, sorry) this seems quite good value considering what the phones offer. However, in japan this is very high. Most phones are free or nearly free. The top of the range phones normally are sold for around 20,000 or less.
I'm annoyed that I didn't bring my camcorder with me. The staff were very nice and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with it. I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking out my AU phone to take pics/movies ;-)
If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I'll try to answer to the best of my abilities.
Joe |
