Through Great Effort Comes Great Reward

SoftBank has been the sole monopoly in Japan for the iPhone since it first exploded onto the market years ago. The problem with SoftBank is that their reception has always been poor; it is the biggest complaint of iPhone users (and SoftBank users for that matter) for years.

Enter competition...

This past October au, another major carrier started handling the iPhone. Their carrier service has always been in my opinion (different from that of Jaime and Jason I think) much more reliable. Docomo I hear is the most stable of all but I have always been with au. So I thought I would give the au iPhone a go this time around.

Hiroko switched from au to SoftBank this past July on the advice of her brother but she has not been happy with the service to date. Since I switched to the iPhone it has been
More difficult to connect to each other as the iPhone system doesn't provide instantaneous push service of mail. The best you can set is 15min interval checks. Of course you can open the mailer and it checks for you but if you are waiting for a message while the phone is in your pocket and you aren't checking it all the time like an email junkie then you won't feel the buzz until your phone checks at the predetermined interval. This IS a drawback.

Also the Message system here in Japan which uses the phone number to send SMS to only works between users of the same carrier (apparently that will change in the not too distant future) so SoftBank iPhone and au iPhone have their limitations.

Hiroko really didn't like that so although she bought her phone in July yesterday she switched back to au and got a 4S. Now we can communicate with the message system instantly so she is happy.

We tried to set up her Gmail address on the new phone but it just didn't work so in the end we had to delete it and set up a new one. Also we had to transfer her extensive contact list over, set up the dedicated au email address and get her music and photos off the one phone and onto the new one.

It took us six hours to get this all done as the gmail was the most frustrating. After going back to the au shop and getting a lot of help the final conclusion was to make the new address and start fresh. It worked. But we were still limited by the 15minute push option. What to do?

The techie guy who helped us was also frustrated by all of this Gmail trouble and while researching options for us discovered something wonderful!

He found out that instead of using the Gmail setup option if you set up the gmail in the Microsoft Exchange option you will get instantaneous email push and no longer be limited to the silly 15minute push! That works great and gives us the functionality of a Japanese cellphone.

So although it took us six hours to get her phone up and running smoothly we discovered something great in the effort!

Through great effort comes great reward.

I love you!
Cam