For a fleeting moment I thought I might buy the EM-ONE by Emobile. But then I realized that 1) I don’t have any money, and 2) The only time I’m mobile these days is for 30 minutes between home and office. For those of you not in the know, Emobile is the latest company to join the wireless market in Japan claiming to be the first carrier in the world to offer fixed-rate broadband wireless services (up to 3.6Mbps download speed). A wholly owned subsidiary of eAccess, Emobile will launch operations at the end of this month and if you buy one of these things now you can get free access until the end of May. The EM-ONE looks good from the specs and in photos but I went to Bic Camera and took a look at it for real. The thing was covered in fingerprints and what looked like clobs of snot and I dared not pick it up without some gloves. If you go take a look at any kind of gadget in any store, make sure to wash your hands thoroughly afterwards. The sales guy noticed my disgust and quickly cleaned it, but I still wasn’t impressed. It has One-Seg and the page loading was rather fast but the top part that slides open seemed quite flimsy and could easily break off if I dropped it. It’s also a bit too big. I didn’t measure it but it’s about the size of a Nintendo DS Lite which a tad too big for a mobile device, in my mind. Maybe this was by design so they could leverage all the DS Lite cases already available. Still I think it will sell and take some market share away from Wilcomm who seems to be leading in the quasi-pda area with the W-ZERO3[es]

I played around with Brad’s W-ZERO3 the other day and took some screenshots. The first one is my blog, of course. It took ages to load. And the second is of my house in Google Maps. My house is that tiny little one almost completely hidden under the pointer icon. As you can see I live in a rather affluent neighborhood where the houses are pretty big by Tokyo standards. Except mine that is.