Gizmodo is right on the mark here. Japanese phones have lost the lustre they once had; for all the features, they seem out of touch with the phone’s evolution elsewhere into a viable mobile computing device. As Mossberg notes, this is partly due to the carriers dictating what goes in the phone, and what phones go on the network, which is a particularly endemic phenomenon in Japan. At one time, it seemed like the carriers here were driving innovation by pushing phone makers to implement features like e-money across the board, but the momentum seems to have stalled and, while the handsets are impressively functional, they’ve lost their sex appeal and, to my mind, need to catch up on text input; after using an HTC phone with a QWERTY keyboard and consequently using a lot more text-heavy apps on the move, going back to pecking out text with one thumb is excruciating.
