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AU Phones

I picked up a new cell phone last week. The AU Casio A3012CA.

The basic reason is because A.U. has a special for students. 1/2 off their service. That’s $16 a month instead of $32. The phone only cost $80 and my current bill at DoCoMo is around $50 a month so it will only take 3 months to be cheaper.

The phone does have some nifty gadgety features though. One, like my old J-Phone phone it’s got a camera.


But, unlike my J-Phone phone it has to option to take 640×480 pictures. Here’s an example

Both of those pictures are un-retouched. For the small pictures there are also options to put borders/captions etc around the pictures kind of like Purikura.

It’s also got GPS so you can ask for a map, it will ask you for permission to send your location to the server and then it will give you a map of where you are and you can navigate around.

Pretty much all the various companies’ cell phones and be used as a modem for a PDA or Notebook with the correct cable although usually only at 9.6k. These new A.U phones support 144k though which they can also use for browsing the web on the phone making it a little faster. They charge more for fast data though so you can set in the phone if you want to use the original service or the new fast service.

A.U. also supports phone to phone voice e-mail. The advantage over regular voice mail is that with regular voice mail you might interrupt your friend. With voice e-mail that won’t happen. I suspect it’s not used that much but you never know. Of course your friend has to have a phone that supports it too.

The newest A.U. phones also support Java for various games/apps like the both J-Phone and DoCoMo. I don’t think either AU or DoCoMo support 3D yet like J-Phone. Crazier yet, you can buy a gamepad for A.U phones.

Over my last two phones this one has a much much clearer, brighter display and it’s 26000 colors instead of 4096. I wonder how they come up with 26000 colors?

So far I’ve only found a few minor things I liked better from my DoCoMo N503i phone. The N503i has a *desktop* as in you can put icons on it. I had an icon that I could select with 2 clicks that would start an e-mail to myself at home so I could easily send reminders home. So far I haven’t found any kind of shortcut system in my new phone or at least not one that will start with a pre-addressed e-mail. The other is the browser in the N503i seemed to be more forgiving meaning it would display more pages without just crapping out and saying “undisplayable”. It’s also true that DoCoMo/iMode having like 65% of the market has more support. For example I can’t read the Japanese gaming news site, gamespot, on this phone specifically because gamespot checks for the browser and only supports iMode phones.

May 3rd, 2002 | Tags: , | Category: news
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  • anon_Harvey
    Drool. It’s Harvey.

    Man. I so can’t wait to get to Japan.

    I drooled all over my keyboard after reading this…

  • anon_haken
    voyeurcam

    Having been to Japan a couple of times, I have no doubts that these cameras on the cell phones will have great potential for that underbelly sector of the Japanese populace who are into voyueristic activities. Case in point, that picture you took.

    Btw, great site with stuff on Japan.

  • Harvey
    Nope

    Uh, I think those girls in the pic are his friends.

    Duh!

    But yeah, I heard a rumor that phones with cameras had to be banned because oyaji would take ‘upskirt’ pictures too often.

    Hrm.

  • greggman
    No camera bans

    There have been problems with cameras but not cellphone cameras and no banning regardless. Pretty much all of J-Phone’s entire lineup have cameras and now there’s also the heavily advertised movie mail.

    The problem they did have was with small video cameras like security cameras or spy cameras. None were banned but there were a few incidents of finding them in women’s restrooms.

    Oh, and yes those girls in the pictures are my friends. But, interestingly, all the cameras make a noise when you take a picture meaning they play a toon or a digital sample. Given that you can turn every other noise off in the phone I have to assume this is a concession to making it slightly harder to get away with candid pictures because people will hear the sound. Of course on a train with your finger over the speaker no one would hear it anyway.

  • greggman
    My phone’s got 128Meg

    I was wondering how much space was in my phone because the dang thing can save lots of stuff. Photos, Tunes, Memo, A Scheduler, E-Mails, Frames to put over photos, Stamps to apply to photos, Java Apps, Recorded voice mails, voice e-mails, the message to answer by when you don’t answer, etc… I’ve been writing alot of e-mail on the phone lately, of course they are small but still I was wondering how much space I had left since I probably have a couple hundred e-mails in the phone (I save all my e-mail)

    Anyway, I finally futsed around and found the memory stats. The think has 128MEG of flashmemory for storing stuff. That’s more than any PALM or CE PDA machine!!!! Yea, I know you can put memory cards in those things, still it 128MEG!!! I’m only 2% full so far. At 8K for small photo (see above) and 45K for a large photo that’s somewhere between 3000 and 16000 photos I could have in that thing before it filled up!!! I’m not sure I could possibly put 16000 photos on that thing in 3 years.

    I have software for getting all the data off. You plug it into a serial port or a USB port and you can download/upload most to all of that stuff.

  • sukebekuro
    bilingual

    hey, i’m seriously considering getting this phone, but i’m wondering, is it bilingual? i know you don’t need such things, but I’m still at the early stages of my Nihon’go dev….

  • greggman
    You LOSE!!! (not bilingual)

    Sorry, no bilingual mode. The manual does have an English section that covers all the basics but not all the details. The manuals for these phones are like 400 pages!!!!. The English part is usually like 10 to 40 pages.

    (Yea I know that sounds complicated but generally if you can read the menus you can figure out how to use it. I can see how if it didn’t have an English mode you might be out of luck for a while though)

    AU has a few phones that are bilingual though I think none of the new ones except for the Sony-Ericsson one. J-Phone also has a few but it’s like maybe 1 of 7 phones is bilingual.

  • greggman
    Not 128meg only 12.8meg

    Oops. I mis-read it.  Still, that’s like 330 images at 640×480 or 1500+ at the smaller size.

  • anon_Anon
    NorthAmerica

    Anyone know if I can use an Au phone on a NorthAmerica CDMA network.  I know there is an AU one called the global passport, but that one has to be bill to Japan. I want one so I can use it on there local network. 

  • greggman
    Sorry

    No you can’t use them in North America. :-(

    Sharp has one phone out in North America.  Maybe eventually they will release some of their cooler ones

  • anon_Icie
    sharp

    which sharp phone is it?

  • anon_Ashley
    AU phones

    I’m coming to Japan soon for a year, so how can i qualify to get the 50% off student thing for AU phones? and also I’ve been reading the pages, but my Japanese is not perfect, so I can’t decide if there’s a one year contract or not.  Do I have to sign a contract like in the United states?

  • greggman
    50% phones

    to be honest, so far I have not been able to notice any difference in bill from my 50% off phone.  I’m not a big phone user.  I probably only have someone call me one it once every 2 or 3 days.  I also don’t send that much e-mail.  The average Japanese girl writes like 10-20 a day. I write maybe 2 a day.  I also don’t browse the net much.  And yet, my bill ends up being 6000 yen a month.

    That’s the same or more than I ever paid on any other service with no *discount*.  Clearly it’s a scam.

    As for contracts, yes, to get a phone cheap you generally need to sign a year contract.

  • anon_Phil
    RE: 50% Phones

    If you go with J-phone, you can buy pre-paid phones, and they’re only like $100 USD for the phone and your first card.  The best thing about the pre-paid is, you can call the US at the same rate as a local cal in Japan.

     

  • anon_Phil
    RE: North America

    Actually, I live in Hawaii, and I brought my AU phone back with me From Japan, and I can use it here.  Each calls costs me about ･300 per minute, but I can use it.  You just have to have the AU shop activate the world call plan or something like that…it’s free.

  • Marcelo
    In New Jersey, USA

    I live in NJ but I want to use an i-mode phone so I can play FF:U with U and the upcoming Final Fantasy game.  Does anybody know how I can go about this?  IF you could reply to marcelox@optonline.net, that would be great.  I’m at a total loss here.  Thanks.

    Marcelo

  • http://blog.greggman.com greggman
    You can’t

    sorry. I-Mode phones will not work in the USA

  • Saara
    Hey

    If anyone knows wher i could get one of them A3012CA-s, i would really appreciate it . Thanks!

  • Gavin
    Casio other languages?

    Does the Casio phone have other languages? I’m in China and want to see if I can get chinese or english language working for one I’m thinking of ordering.

    Thx for any info!

  • http://www.imoji.com imoji
    i-mode Australia ?

    I really miss my i-mode from when I was living in Japan. Our old phones here are so out of date, but I guess they do the job. I think we’ll start to get them late 2004 or early 2004 so I can’t wait until we get i-mode Australia. Of course, there needs to be compelling & worthwhile content too, something we didn’t get with WAP.