Help Mad Pierrot

[mad pierrot]

Ok, fellow Jref members, time to help out Mad Pierrot.

This mostly concerns people living in Japan, but any and all who have lived here or are knowledgeable can reply.

I need a cellphone!

I never thought that this day would come. After living here for almost 3 years and never having the need for one, I'm a little disappointed. I need one for my new job.

Anyways, here's a few questions for all of those with Keitais.

-Which company provides the best service?
-Which is the cheapest?
-Are prepaid phones better?
-What is the easiest way to get a phone?

I won't be doing any long distance calling with it, just domestic. Any words of wisdom?


:sorry:

[lexico]

When I saw the title, I immediately imagined something in the line of "Save Toby !!" That is, I thought you got kidnapped for a handsome amount of ransome ! Ahahahahaha...
"Send some money or Mad Pierrot shall be no more after xx_xx_xxxx !@!"
Sorry about that; couldn't resist ! :biggrin:

I'm really sorry about your cellphone situation. I've had one maybe three times in the past 14 yrs... and always ended up ditching it !
My next job seeking seems like I'll be looking for one pretty soon, so I will be reading up on any useful advice you're getting, so I'm expecting some damn good advice here. Better be real good, too !

[Hiroyuki Nagashima]

Please try to use cellular phone plan comparison of "kakaku.com".

http://kakaku.com/keitai/

[jamosaka]

-What is the easiest way to get a phone?


Step 1. Take a Japanese (girl)friend to a phone shop.

Step 2. Point at the phone that looks nicest/cheapest/least complicated.

Step 3. Wait for (girl)friend to sort everything out.


This simple plan can be adapted to many aspects of life in Japan - try it!

Caution: may encourage lethargy, particularly during summer.

[Iron Chef]

Wow, I can't imagine going for three years without a phone in Japan... Well, let's see (based on my experience):

To purchase a phone you'll probably need some if not all of the following things:

Gaikoku Torokusho
Hanko (although I have heard that a signature is acceptable in some places)
Bank acct. (make sure you have your acct. # with you if you plan on having it automatically deducted every month)
Credit Card # (if you plan on paying with that)

Note: I have changed phones a lot since i've been here but the only carrier I use is DoCoMo so I can only speak in regards to them and their policies.

Initially I had thought that I would simply have my bill mailed to my current address and then i'd just take it the local convenience store to pay it off (like my utilities, etc.) but to do so requires a ￥30,000 deposit upfront. That being said, I chose the most common payment option which was to have it automatically deducted from my UFJ acct. every month. After my one-year contract expired and I renewed, I also became eligible for their Premium club (point bonuses, discounts, etc.).

I also learned that there is in fact a way to get around having your acct. deducted every month as long as you make sure there are insufficient funds to be withdrawn. DoCoMo will promptly send you a bill which you can then take to your local convenience store. You can do this as many times as you like and you won't be penalized although i'm used to the automatic withdrawal now so I just budget it in accordingly.

Btw, it should be mentioned that almost all models (with the exception of a lot of prepaid phones) have an English mode. In terms of pricing plans, generally all plans start from around ￥3,000+. For myself, I choose the next highest plan which guarantees me more free minutes but depending on use (sounds like you'll use it sparingly), you could opt for the cheapest plan and be ok. Minutes in excess aren't really that much more expensive although the disparity is noticeable if you use a LOT of excess minutes. You are also charged for packets sent (I send a LOT of e-mails, sometimes 20/day) but this is again negligible.

I do one-year extensions and since I have already successfully completed my initial year-long contract, should I decide for any reason to terminate my existing one with little or no notice then I only have to pay that month's service plan charge as one-time penalty (about ￥3900). Some contracts, unless you're careful-will dupe you into paying the remainder of the balance in full (total service charges) when you break so make sure you make it explicitly known that you may wish to terminate down the road at some point in time.

A lot of the newer features on phones are pretty nice but in reality they are just a lot of eye-candy and gimmicks imho (TV tuner, audio, waterproofed, etc.) and unless you plan on sitting on a train somewhere or being stuck in an airport for hours on end, I think you can afford to skip all the newest trends. Something I do loike though is the high-quality cameras that are being touted with the latest models. The newest Foma model for instance has a 3.0 megapixel camera with optical zoom but comes with a hefty price tag of about ￥38,000.

Compare that with the Premini-II I just picked up for ￥6,000 and has a 1.3 megapixel camera with 16x digital zoom. Decent enough for my needs. You of course, may find that you don't even need a camera option but it is nice to have since the images are pretty nice quality and can be uploaded from your phone's memory and or separate stick/card.

What else... Hmm, maybe that's all I can think of for now. Oh, and don't forget that there are plenty of decent, slightly outdated models that you can get for absolutely free. Most of these probably won't be displayed since parlors are small and display space is usually reserved for the newest models. If you go to an actual shop for instance and not just a parlor (think kiosk) then you can usually find a small section of "0￥" models.

Anyways, hope that helps. Again, things may be different with the other carriers but I do highly recommend DoCoMo. I've never had a problem to date regardless of whether i'm calling Sapporo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, or back home in the States.

[Mike Cash]

Step 1. Take a Japanese (girl)friend to a phone shop.

Step 2. Point at the phone that looks nicest/cheapest/least complicated.

Step 3. Wait for (girl)friend to sort everything out.


This simple plan can be adapted to many aspects of life in Japan - try it!

Caution: may encourage lethargy, particularly during summer.

How sad it must be for you to not have the dignity that goes with being a functional adult.

[mad pierrot]

I appreciate it.

When I saw the title, I immediately imagined something in the line of "Save Toby !!" That is, I thought you got kidnapped for a handsome amount of ransome ! Ahahahahaha...
"Send some money or Mad Pierrot shall be no more after xx_xx_xxxx !@!"
Sorry about that; couldn't resist !

Heh, we could start a "Save Mad Pierrot's Friday Night Beer Funds" campaign. I accept all forms of donation, liquids included!


Thanks for the great link, Hiroyuki. I'm browsing it right now. I'm not quite up to speed enough to read everything on the site, but I can understand enough of it.

Step 1. Take a Japanese (girl)friend to a phone shop.

Step 2. Point at the phone that looks nicest/cheapest/least complicated.

Step 3. Wait for (girl)friend to sort everything out.

LOL, that was the first thought that crossed my mind. :blush:




Thanks for the GREAT post Iron Chef. Very Informative.


Initially I had thought that I would simply have my bill mailed to my current address and then i'd just take it the local convenience store to pay it off (like my utilities, etc.) but to do so requires a ￥30,000 deposit upfront. That being said, I chose the most common payment option which was to have it automatically deducted from my UFJ acct. every month. After my one-year contract expired and I renewed, I also became eligible for their Premium club (point bonuses, discounts, etc.).

Hmm... Do you happen to know if they will accept postal accounts? The only savings account I have is with the national postal service.

I'm not worried about bells/whistles. I don't even care if my phone doesn't have a camera, but I would like to be able to send text messages with it. Is this a standard feature on phones?



Thanks a bunch. :sorry:

[Iron Chef]

I can't say for certain but your postal acct. should be just fine since that's a pretty commonly accepted means of transaction nowadays. If you're only interested in a bare-bones "does the job and nothing else"-type phone then I would recommend one of the 0￥ models. Most even have a camera (rare nowadays for that function to not be available with the exception of some prepaid units) although the pixel-quality/resolution won't be very good. It's fun to take a pic of everyone you know and store it in your phone's memory. You can then add it to their entry in your phonebook. Whenever that person calls or mails you, their pic will show up on your sub-screen first letting you know instantaneously who it is (in other words, free caller ID, heh).

DoCoMo offers the "I-Mode" service (available for ￥300 extra per month) which is an absolute must-have imho. It allows you to not only send text msgs. but also allows access to the internet. I use it quite often to check train times, expected weather conditions, latest headlines, play games, download ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Assuming you have a built-in camera, you can also send pics you take included as attachments to your text msgs. You can also send msgs. via your phone to most PC accts. with a maximum of 500 characters. In terms of packet charges for text msgs. this is what my manual says:

1 packet=128 bytes
1 packet=￥0.3
"Up to 400 packets per month are free of charge for any standard plan."

Granted, I send and receive a LOT of mails every day. My monthly packet communication charges are never more than a few hundred ￥ at best, so in other words feel free to mail to your heart's content. 8-)

[jamosaka]

How sad it must be for you to not have the dignity that goes with being a functional adult.

I left my dignity behind in my first Japanese space toilet.

Functional people? Who wants to be one of those?

[Mike Cash]

If you like having to have someone follow you around and figuratively wipe your butt for you day in and day out, that's your perfect right.

[Silverpoint]

A few observations I've made that might help you out.

AU tends to have the fewest number of bilingual (Japanese/English) handsets. DoCoMo and Vodafone make sure that pretty much all their handsets are bilingual these days.

i-mode email is a little weak. It's a maximum of 500 characters (and that's not a lot sometimes), so you may need to split messages over several emails if you need to send something in detail. This is also true for incoming email so you can only receive 500 characters at a time. This can be especially annoying if people send you emails from PCs as they often type a lot more. However there is a feature on DoCoMo phones that allows incoming emails to be split into up to four 500 character chunks. This feature is normally NOT set to "on" by default, so you need to find it on your phone and set it up, otherwise when someone sends you a long email it just gets truncated after 500 characters.

From my experience of about half a dozen phones so far I'd say that Vodafone have the best English manuals. That is to say that they translate more of the manual into English whereas with DoCoMo you tend to get only the main features and you're left to figure out a lot yourself. I can't speak for AU because I've never owned one of their phones.

If you're going down the DoCoMo route, I'd suggest getting a FOMA phone. This is DoCoMo's (reasonably) new 3G standard. You can get a 1 yen FOMA phone now which also supports i-mode.

It's not true that 1 yen phones always have crappy cameras and other features. My current phone cost 1 yen (DoCoMo Sharp SH505is which I bought about 14 months ago) and it has a 2 megapixel autofocus camera on it. Although its not great in dark conditions, in good lighting there are times when the quality is not that far off my Sony Cybershot, especially when printing.

If you're into music, it's worth getting a phone that has a built in music player as this will mean you only have to carry one device all day. AU has made a big deal of putting MP3 players into their phones recently although a number of handets by the other two also support music.

When I bought my last phone, I'd just changed my hanko (personal stamp used like a signature), but I hadn't informed my bank yet, so they rejected my direct debit instruction. But DoCoMo didn't stop my phone service - I just had to pay at a convenience store for a while until I sorted it out. So I guess it may be possible to get a phone without a bank account, but I'm not an authority on this one, so don't take this as guaranteed. However they most certainly didn't charge me 30,000 upfront.

If you want the latest greatest all-singing-all-dancing phone, you'll probably get a better deal going to a third-party supplier rather than to an "official" shop. These third-party suppliers need to compete on price because they're not backed (or constrained) by the big networks and so they'll often give better discounts or deals. They might also be slightly more inclined to 'bend the rules' a little if you don't have all the officially stated documentation (although this is only a hunch).

Finally, if you have any problems at all communicating in Japanese, I'd say taking a Japanese friend or girl/boyfriend is a very GOOD idea. Although the earlier poster probably made this comment with tongue-in-cheek, at the end of the day you're signing a legally binding contract and filling in a bunch of forms. If you don't know what you're reading, writing or being told then you only have yourself to blame if you mess up. I've gone with numerous friends to phone shops, because they needed help, and I'm sure that plenty of people (Japanese or good Japanese speakers) would be happy to do the same for you. It's not "losing your dignity" at all. It's a sensible thing to do.

[Mike Cash]

It's not "losing your dignity" at all. It's a sensible thing to do.

Sure, it's sensible. But the post 1) is based on the assumption that gaijin = nonfunctional and 2) seems to suggest (continued) reliance on a Japanese handler as a matter of routine.

[DoctorP]

I have to say that the DoCoMo phones have excellent English manuals. I just bought my phone last week, and I was able to download the manual that night from DoCoMo's website.

The 1Yen phones are usually available on the weekends during the bigger sales. They are usually the discontinued last years models.

[Kinsao]

Chill, Mikecash - it was meant as a joke originally! :relief:

[Mike Cash]

It may have been meant jokingly, but I doubt it was meant as a joke.

[Iron Chef]

"When I bought my last phone, I'd just changed my hanko (personal stamp used like a signature), but I hadn't informed my bank yet, so they rejected my direct debit instruction. But DoCoMo didn't stop my phone service - I just had to pay at a convenience store for a while until I sorted it out. So I guess it may be possible to get a phone without a bank account, but I'm not an authority on this one, so don't take this as guaranteed. However they most certainly didn't charge me 30,000 upfront."

Allow me to clear up any confusion. If you register a new phone and want to have the bill sent to you directly instead of automatically deducted every month (via either credit or bank) then the only option is to pay the ￥30,000 deposit upfront. Of course, I chose automatic withdrawal to avoid the hassle. I've bought new phones (changed numbers both times) in both Nagoya and Fukuoka and I was told on both occasions that if I wanted to have the bill sent to my residence to pay myself via a convenience store FROM THE START, then I had to fork over the deposit.

Taken from the "FOMA and Mova Mobile Phone Service Subscriber's Guide" verbatim (p.152):

"1. New Customers
Please bring the following items:
Proof of identity verifying your name and current address.
Bank account details (bank passbook and personal seal) to apply for automatic deduction.

Required charges:
Application charge ￥3,000 (￥3,150 incl. tax)
Price of the handset
For customers indicated below, a deposit of an amount determined separately by NTT DoCoMo (max ￥100,000/contract, interest fee)
-Person applying for multiple contracts within a certain period
-Foreign national with status of temporary resident who pays monthly charges by billing statement.
-Persons with payments outstanding to other mobile operators."

[Kinsao]

It may have been meant jokingly, but I doubt it was meant as a joke.

I'm confused as to the exact differences now... :mad:
Oh well - time for Kinsao to retire gracefully...

[DoctorP]

@Iron Chef....I didn't have to pay the deposit. The bill is sent straight to my home for me to pay at the combini.

Another note on the phones. You can haggle with them on the prices. I didn't like the 1 Yen phones they had. Instead I wanted one of the newer phones that have TV reception, bar code scanner, DoCoMo's new easy pay system (allows you to buy things with only your cell phone, no cash!) etc... Now I could have waited till the next model year and they would have been 1Yen too...but instead I told them without that phone I wouldn't sign. They gave me the phone for Y1,500 only!

[Iron Chef]

Well, all I can say then is for whatever reason I didn't have the same option offered to me when I signed up so maybe MP won't either. *shrugs*

[mad pierrot]

I think I'm armed and ready enough to go do this with some degree of confidence now. (Better than going in with no idea at all like I would've.) Hopefully I'll get my phone this weekend, or by next Friday by the absolute latest. Of course I'll let everyone know what I get and how I do!

Wish me luck.


:sorry:

[lexico]

Get an unbeatable deal. It is the rule of war, to deprive the enemy of all options except to comply with your desire.
You've got the power (http://www.esigge.ch/primaire/9-medias/pub456/3jouer/huggies.jpg) !
There should have been a better pic, but this was all I could find. :gomen:

[Tonysoong]

If you are so economical as to be interested in a used cell-phone, Mad Peirrot, come to Wuhu for it. It's absolutely free from Tony.

I mean it.

[mad pierrot]

There should have been a better pic, but this was all I could find.

:cool: Great Pic! Take no prisoners!!!!!
:ninja:



If you are so economical as to be interested in a used cell-phone, Mad Peirrot, come to Wuhu for it. It's absolutely free from Tony.

I mean it.

Sounds great! But can you ship it to me?

:p

[duff_o_josh]

when i had ny first phone i had au, it was good cost me one yen and the plan wasnt to bad, but i broke it and it was cheaper to pay the cancelation fee rather then getting a new one from them. my new phone is through vodafone and they have great packages not to mention that they have one yen phones that are great. i have never had to give a 30,000 yen deposit for paying my bill at the convini and i didnt need my hanko, but for my vodafone i used my hanko and allowed them to take money out of my account for bill payment. make sure you look at the different plans carefully because some will have high cancelation fees if you choose the wrong one. vodaphone and au have lots of small add ons to your basic plan and they save you more money the having a big plan. if you have lots of freinds with vodaphone you can call 5 of them all the time for 50% off and free mail also weekends and holidays all calls between 5-30 minutes are free(but you have to pay for the first 5 minutes) also if you get a 3g phone you can use it back in your home country. you can make international calls and the price is ok for calling overseas. i like my vodafone a lot compared to au. i think docomo is to expensive to start up because almost all of the phones are over 10,000yen.

[jamosaka]

How sad it must be for you to not have the dignity that goes with being a functional adult.

I was going to comment on the irony of a 40 year old man with 1700 posts on an internet forum lecturing on dignity and functional adulthood.

However, since a simple bit of sarcasm has confused you so much, I don't think I'll bother.

[Mike Cash]

I was going to comment on the irony of a 40 year old man with 1700 posts on an internet forum lecturing on dignity and functional adulthood.

However, since a simple bit of sarcasm has confused you so much, I don't think I'll bother.

Considering the fact that I don't need somebody to follow me around all day and conduct my business for me and you apparently do, perhaps it is just as well that you didn't.

Your girlfriend do your posting for you?

[mad pierrot]

You're ruining my thread. :danger:



:embarasse

[Silverpoint]

Absolutely. There are people here trying to post useful information and it really doesn't help that certain people seem to feel the need to turn it into a place to have petty arguments.

A couple more things worth mentioning. I don't know about AU and Vodafone, but DoCoMo have a discount if you promise to stay on the same tariff for 12 months. It's worth asking about if you're confident you won't change your phone and you won't leave Japan for the next year. When I took the option, the cancellation charge was just 3,000 so there weren't any major penalties if you did quit.

Also, if you're looking for English language assistance, try looking in your local English language magazine. Something like Metropolis in Tokyo (assuming that thing still exisits, I don't live down there any more) or Xene in Hokkaido. There are sometimes ads for phone shops which provide an English speaking staff member. Vodafone have a specialist English service in one of their shops here in Sapporo.

[Mike Cash]

Absolutely. There are people here trying to post useful information and it really doesn't help that certain people seem to feel the need to turn it into a place to have petty arguments.



If you'll check the time stamps you'll notice that we cut it out over 24 hours ago, when asked to do so by the OP.

Or was this an attempt to jumpstart it again?

[Silverpoint]

By the way Mad Pierrot, be sure to let us know what you opt for. I'm considering changing my own phone sometime in the next couple of months and I'd be curious about what you go for (particularly handset choice). Premini's seem pretty popular amongst a lot of the foreigners I meet right now.

[lexico]

After four years of cellphone celibacy, I have finally given in again. This will be my 4th one in 14 yrs, and I have the slightest idea what I am getting. It was a gift from li'l sis; ain' she sweet ! :-)
What did YOU get Mad Pierrot ? Tell us all about it, please. :p

[Dutch Baka]

have a look here http://www.jref.com/classifieds/showproduct.php?product=208&sort=2&cat=39&page=1

i bought the same one for just 3000 yen, including 3000 yen prepaid, from vodafone...

[mad pierrot]

I was just typing a reply when Lexico posted his!!!

psychic powers?