I finally got rid of my old Toshiba Vodafone keitai. I guess technically it’s now a Softbank phone because they got bought out. It was a decent enough mobile phone but it was literally falling apart, I’d had it for two years, and I was frankly getting a bit fed up with the new management. I’d get an email in Japanese about once a month advertising some feature of their website that I didn’t feel like deciphering, and there seemed to be no way to opt out or even switch it to English. Furthermore, to cut costs they stopped sending monthly statements in the mail. The new way to check your billing? Navigate a site all in Japanese, on your cell phone browser, paying money for the packets the whole way. Or pay 3 bucks a month for the privilege of getting a paper statement.

I had good experience with AU when I was living in Sendai some years ago, and a couple of the new JETs were walking around with the W52SA which has nice features like GPS and built in character recognition (which ties in directly with the dictionary), as well as an antenna for the TV tuner (for those of us not living directly beneath the broadcast towers). It looked nice, so I picked one up.

The phone is pretty nice, and the Engrish seems to be minimized compared to previous models. The Toshiba phone had some unintelligible error messages buried deep within the phone, along with a few internal dialog boxes that seemed to slip by without being translated. Unfortunately, the English integration is still poor even on the newer phone. Many of even the most basic features are simply untranslated. For example, the TV application is only in Japanese. When loading up the TV application I’m presented with a 4 page scrollable notification in Japanese, and good luck trying to choose the correct option from the two at the bottom. All of the critical controls for channel programming are only in Japanese– even though I have my settings set to English. As these are individual phone features, it’s really up to the phone manufacturer to fix these things, and I can’t REALLY blame the service provider.

But the worst offender by far is the AU main portal page. The default page is beautifully laid out in Japanese (again, regardless of your phone’s language setup) with Google search at the top, news, weather, train search, Wikipedia search, billing, support links. If you scroll all the way down there’s an option for an English page, which looks like it was designed in the early 1990s. They haven’t seemed to grasp the idea that if you have two language versions of a site they should look pretty much identical. At the top is a README link, which defaults to Japanese– this is from the English page for crying out loud! There are no links for support or billing, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because they haven’t bothered to translate those pages into English. Good grief, guys, this is the 21st century. Pull your heads out and hire a couple guys to redesign your site, preferably one of them a native English speaker, and get the site to look as good as the Japanese one. I understand if the news isn’t translated every day, because that’s a continuing cost. But for crying out loud, billing and support only have to be translated once!

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