Camera phones, bad loans

The Nippon TV six o'clock news carried a cautionary item tonight on camera cellphones; teen/20s, a big user segment, are not grasping what it costs to send a mail with a photo attachment (the report put it at 2X-10X the cost of a normal e-mail) and are ending up with monthly bills of JPY15,000-20,000 in some cases. A couple of those interviewed said they'd hit as much as JPY120,000 per month on occasion. What's driving this is partly the culture of passing acquaintance; if you have a photo memo of the person you just exchanged numbers with, no need to remember the face that goes with the name, since it pops up when they call.

This kind of news piece is human-interest fluff, of course; as ever, the Japanese media goes over the top at anything in vogue among high-school girls in Tokyo, and one doubts the high rollers featured are typical (though you wonder how much of J-Phone's mid-JPY7,000s ARPU is due to the JPY15-20K a month crowd). The amount of money some are prepared to spend on cellular bills, though, is one data point, apart from the seemingly pretty healthy restaurant industry, that leads one to wonder just how widely the tendrils of recession have spread into the public consciousness and the public wallet. It will be interesting to see what happens if the government follows through on its newfound enthusiasm for sorting out the banks' bad loans now rather than muddling through interminably, bankruptcies jump steeply, and Dad's unexpected career switch into the fast-food industry leaves him unable to pay the kids' phone bills.

For everyone who fears if not the new technology then at least the invoices it produces, however, there are those for whom camera (or more precisely video) phones are finding a new use. First time I've seen it was when Typhoon Higos came through town last week--one of the TV stations had a guy in Shibuya with a FOMA videophone reporting on the state of the storm. The quality was intermittent given W-CDMA's readiness to cease working should a stray raindrop get in the way or a butterfly flap its wings in Brazil, but once there are sufficient base stations that the waves don't have to do anything strenuous like going round corners, it's a technology that could slash the cost and boost the speed of news reporting. Suddenly you can have someone on the scene for the price of a tube fare and a few minutes of talk time. Would be nice if it were compatible with PC videoconferencing software and the like, though--at the moment it's only a 64Kbps phoneline connection, which knocks the idea of a cheap, live Internet TV news station on the head for the moment. Maybe mobile IP phones with cameras will be needed for the real breakthrough. Mitsubishi already has a home-use IP phone service through a subsidiary, IP Talk, and has developed a cellular IP handset for use with HotSpots and the like, so it may not be too far away.

Dad may be able to draw comfort from the fact that IP phone call charges are free while he's flipping burgers, too.