I picked up the N904i yesterday morning and spent most of the day doing my due diligence on it. The good news is that it is an excellent handset. The bad news is that I learned a very expensive lesson about paying attention. Using i-mode or the full browser can be very costly since all carriers charge sometime like ¥20 for 10K of data use. The data download speed on this phone is 3.6Mbps which makes browsing and downloading data even faster. No one in their right mind would use this service without being on one of the flat-rate data packages called パケ放題 pake-hodai. “pake” is short for “packet” and “hodai” means “all you can~” as in “all you can eat.”

So anyway, when I bought the phone I signed up for the pakehodai full which is the data package that includes data use on the full browser. It costs ¥5,900 per month. What the woman at the keitai shop didn’t tell me was that the pakehodai didn’t start until June 1st. I guess she assumed I didn’t want to pay the flat rate fee from day one because there were only a few days left in the month. Wrong!!! She probably explained it to me but I didn’t hear her. There was a problem with the Mobile Number Portability process which distracted both of us. At a proper Docomo shop, they have procedures to explain each section of the form to make sure there are no misunderstandings, but at small phone shops often they don’t explain everything properly. This meant that I was paying for every packet of data I was using all day! Luckily, I realized this last night and called Docomo to have it corrected. I cannot imagine what my phone bill would be like had I not realized this and kept downloading stuff for the next few days. I checked my usage this morning and I had already accrued about ¥26,000!! I downloaded a free 40sec 10MB video file which I wish I didn’t do…it costs me around ¥12,000! F*ck! Oh well, I blame only myself for not scrutinizing my application form more thoroughly before signing. Bite the bullet and pay it off. So learn from my mistake and BE CAREFUL!!

Now back to the N904i. It’s great. The N series has always been a conservative and rather dull handset, but this latest version improves on so much of the standard features and along with the high res screen makes this one of the best keitais I’ve used. Usually, I have one or two peeves about every phone, but I still cannot find any wrong with the N904i.

The full browser is not unlike ones you’ll see on other phones, except because this is a high speed keitai with a screen res of 480 X 854 it makes the browsing experience actually useful. The browser does have a maximum limit to the size of the page it can display so large pages like my blog’s top page will not load completely. Not a big deal as most sites I would want to visit using my keitai are mostly text. The photos above do not due the beautiful screen any justice. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

The GPS Navi is excellent. The Zenrin maps are incredibly detailed and the application makes Navitime look like crap. Because the N904i comes with a mouse-like neuro pointer, you can scroll the map in the same way you would with a touch screen car navi. It’s amazing, really.

You can see more screen shots of the phone at K-Tai Watch.