Posts by Thorsten Kemp

Fukushima update: No chance cooling fuel can breach vessels

Great wrap-up

Thanks for this nice and level-headed article. As somebody who is still doing the usual 9-to-5 routine in Tokyo I can't agree more to the view that the situation is much more under control than the mainstream media would make you believe. I'm working in a basically engineer-only environment and there have been more sneers than I can count at the media magically transforming "may have been" into "has been" or "is still going on!!!". Everybody here is sure that the confusion and fear-mongering has had more of an health impact than the radiation itself.

Here in Japan (Wednesday afternoon) the situation is stable without big news...but everything seems to have lost quite the level of urgency that the media had whipped up over the last few days.

Again, thanks for the spot-on analysis.

Japan fine with cheap old mobile phones, ta very much

What's so dumb about Japanese phones?

One big difference to the "dumb"phones anywhere else seems to be that in Japan, devices have been optimized for mobile mailing from the start.

Blackberry? Sneered at. Smartphones? Nobody gets the point.

A whole generation of Japanese have learned to type blazingly fast on mobile phone keyboards and many people do not even have other email addresses than the one tied to their mobile phones.

While everybody has been ridiculing or roundly ignoring WAP, the Japanese providers have quietly build their own solutions which cater to every (carnal) demand of their users whilst allowing them to roam the Internet freely as well.

Japanese phones have been loaded with an astomishing number of features over the time, none of which seems to have made it off the island however. Examples include mobile digital TV, radio, wireless payment and lately apparently even car key functionality (Nissan smart key).

Summing up, it's always been another world over here. Plus, there's the Japanese tendency to incrementaly improve and tune an existing system until there is positively NO way to get more performance/functions/money out of it.

So...the question is, whats so smart about *smart*phones.