Japanese Phones Slimming Down

Since Softbank took over Vodafone, they have been promoting the image that they are a "slim phone" carrier. Slim keitai like the 706P, 705SC, 706SC, 707SC and 709SC (damn, Samsung makes a lot of phones) have been heavily marketed to enforce this. For a couple months it looked like Softbank was where to go for unobtrusive mobiles. Now DoCoMo has entered the slim keitai market with a vengeance. The 703iμ series, at 11.4mm for the Panasonic and NEC versions, and only 9.9mm for the Mitsubishi version, trump Softbank's thinnest 707SC at 11.9mm.

Sure they are not loaded with all the features, but they have the essentials (scheduler, phone book, somewhat decent 1.3MP camera) and the P and N models have music players can use microSD to expand their memory. I still like the Softbank 709SC I am using, but will be trying these out over the next few weeks.

By the way, the D800iDS was not all that. Cool idea, but the interface is a little slow and there is not much innovative use of the touchscreen outside of click-wheel-style menu scrolling.