Phone Pictures

For a while, I was trying to convince myself that I should buy a smaller, pocketable camera. I love my D80, and you guys collectively see a very small portion of the pictures I take, in large part due to my lack of a ‘Net connection, and the remaining part due to the fact that most of them are 20 different angles on the same thing.

Anyway, I finally got a cell phone two days ago. My provider is Softbank, the second or third largest carrier in Japan. Between NTT Docomo, au by KDDI, and Softbank, there are something like 110 million cell phones in use. And there are a bunch of smaller carriers as well.

Kind of an odd transition, right? Look, here’s another!

Well, with the exception of the two pictures of the phone, I took the rest of the pictures in this post with the camera integrated into my cell phone, a 707SCII. It’s a prepaid model, so it doesn’t have super-leet features like One-seg or a touch screen, but it has a nice display that is pleasantly large and bright, a pretty decent camera, as you can see from these shots, and you can even do video calls with it. I fully intend to give that a try, but it’s not something I would use commonly, as it costs ￥16 for 6 seconds, which comes out to about $1.50 per minute. Voice calls are about half as expensive, at $0.90 per minute.

First, you don’t pay for incoming calls, so when NTT calls me and I spend an hour trying to understand their one English-speaking guy, or they spend an hour trying to understand me, I’m not charged. Second: for $3.00, I get unlimited text messages for a month.

And now you see why the Japanese use text messaging so much.

Here you can see a couple of random pictures from my phone, most of which came out at least decently. Nothing really impressive, but I'm coming from the i275, which has a VGA camera.

First up is the shot of the car and the safety cones. The road that car is driving on is a two-lane road. You will notice that it is all the way on the far side, and the distance from the white line to the car is about the same as the height of a safety cone. If it were a less busy road, I would've put the cone in the road to demonstrate. Point is, the roads here are tiny.

Next up is this metal plate in the ground that reads "Kyoto City". Nobody knows what they're for, as far as I can tell, but they're everywhere, and not always the same distance apart. People seem to agree that it's so you know what town you're in, but I have a hard time imagining someone being that drunk, even here.
Then there's the arrow. Nobody that I've asked has even the slightest idea what the arrow is supposed to point at. They vary based on nothing that I can identify. They don't always point north, or even usually. The only thing I've come up with is that they might mark property lines. But I don't know.

And here's a close-up.