Horas and konnichiwa untuk semua

Japan has been using proprietary cellular phone system, one of them is the PDC. It was KDDI that first used a more international system, i.e., Qualcomm’s cdmaOne. Then with the advent of 3G service in Japan, NTT and Vodafone followed by adopting W-CDMA. In the meantime KDDI moved to CDMA 2000 for its 3G service.

KDDI now offers roaming to many countries that adopt CDMA 2000 like Korea, USA and Australia (and more recently Indonesia). NTT and Vodafone offer roaming to countries that adopt W-CDMA, as well as to GSM areas with its dual mode (GSM/W-CDMA) handset. However, all of these roaming is quite impractical for most people, as roaming charges are very expensive. On the other hand, currently there is almost now way to use Japanese handset (i.e., handsets that are made in Japan for Japan’s domestic market, which are often much more advanced than handsets for other markets) abroad without using roaming services offered by Japanese cellular companies. That is, all dual mode handsets are (U)SIM locked. And most often this lock is not like Nokia simple lock, but hardcodedly (or close to it) locked. Certain old dual mode handset like Vodafone V-N701(made by NEC) is known to be unlockable quite easily, because it is just a Japanese version of same model also released abroad. But all later handsets like Vodafone V801 is not known to be unlockable.

Here is a blog thread about unlocking (unsuccesfully) Japanese handsets (there is an unverified rumor that in Manila, Philippines, there is a shop that can unlock V801):
http://www.yasukawa.com/blog/archives/000149.html

Here is a user forum abroad discussing about tightly locked V801
http://www.gsmarena.com/sharp_v801sh-reviews-645p4.php

Nokia however offers dual GSM/W-CDMA Japanese phone
http://www.e-shopreg.com/shop/phone/7600/
But IMHO this phone looks weird, lousy and silly design

I wish in the future there will be either reasonably priced roaming service, or reasonably priced unlocked Japanese handset. I would love to use my handset (which I bought for less than 20USD but is much more advanced than many Nokia’s offerings) when traveling abroad. This handset has 2 megapixel camera, QVGA screen, 12MB internal memory, Java, USB, miniSD card etc.