MWC: funny and useful things at NTT DoCoMo's stand

Although we, Europeans, are not directly affected by NTT DoCoMo's devices, we still felt the need to visit the Japanese company's stand, hoping to find something interesting. We found.

The unusually kind personnel was very willing to show us everything. First we cast our eyes upon the huge phone, made for children, which has an alarm feature: if the young owner is in danger, he or she can pull the string at the side of the phone which makes the device emit a deafening whistle, blinks, writes "help" on the display and calls mom or dad.

Just near the orange monster there was a model made for the elderly. Besides the milder edition of the alarm function (whistles more silently and does not blink) it also has a decently working voice recognition, which helps the owner even in writing an email. As my knowledge of the Japanese language is really weak, I couldn't test the efficiency of the algorithm, but the employees of NTT told us, that it's completely okay. In case this is not true, the elderly can also use an alternative text-entry mode too. There is given a copy-book and a laser-sensor pencil. The copybook contains drawings with some stuff underneath them which is recognized by the laser sensor. The pictures mean words/sentences/sentence parts and the text can be composed of these which is then sent by the phone to the addressee. Usability is questionable, as the vocabulary of the copy-book is very limited and moreover it is not sure that older people can clearly see the 3x3 cm large pictures. Furthermore it is still simpler to make a call, but this is not a bad idea either.

Finally we took a look at the games. Unknown phone, with an unknown 3D accelerator chip in it, but it is sure that the display looking a 3.5-4" at first glance, has WQVGA resolution. Two games were offered for demonstration, a robotic-sword fighting and a car racing one; I chose the latter. The device had a motion sensor, which was used for steering, everything worked swell, the graphics were beautiful, it looked good even on the 100 cm LCD TV and that's not a small performance.