Spiffy New Cell Phone!

So, I got myself a prepaid cell phone from the big Japanese company called softbank. I highly recommend doing so for students who are going to be here for a while--it's definitely convenient. The prices for making calls is kinda crazy (but it's that way in all of Japan whether it's a cell or a landline) but as with phones in Japan receiving calls is always free regardless of if they're international. Softbank also does this thing where you can get the unlimited email service thing on it for about $3.50 and that then assigns your phone an email address which you can then send and receive mails from. It's more similar to a texting feature than real email, but it's incredibly awesome for when you need to contact someone and don't want to pay to call them. The neat thing is then you can give that email out to all your friends and family, have them write and email and send it to that, and you'll receive it as a free text on your phone. You can then reply :) Spiffy.

For those who are interested:

My phone's email is edwardss(at)softbank.ne.jp (Please turn the (at) I wrote into @ when emailing me. I have to write it this way so that internet crawlers don't capture the email and spam it :P)

The phone number is 08039191657 (You'll of course need to know how to call a Japanese phone from the US though)

Feel free to send me mail via that address. Please take into consideration that I'll be about 14 hours ahead of you, so if you can help it don't mail me when it's 4 am here XD Otherwise, feel free. My phone will be off during class, but I'll have it on me as often as I can :)

This prepaid phone is actually freaking awesome. I paid about $70 or so for it, but it's better than a lot of US phones I see. This phone automatically syncs up to the local TV stations and lets me watch the local TV channels in surprisingly good quality. Can you do that on a cheap US prepaid phone? Methinks not.

There were a couple other prepaid phones; one at about $30 and $50 (but that one was out of stock. That was what I was planning to buy) and they both looked ok, and way better than any US prepaid phone at that price point :P