Finally moved into the modern age a couple of weeks ago by swapping my phone for something a bit more modern. When I bought my old one four years ago it was the very latest phone on the market but in an ever-changing market it wasn’t long before it became dated.

In the present day that phone was considered ancient and the network carrier changed name from Vodafone to Softbank ages ago so it was high time I traded it in. The old one had a TV function on it which I rarely used (as mentioned in a previous post, Japanese TV is not so interesting to non-Japanese people) so I didn’t bother getting such a feature on the new lighter model.

The Japanese are aboslutely obsessed with their mobiles and the trains, for example, are full of people playing with their phones. While I do a bit of that myself I only really ever use the e-mailing function (the equivalent of text messaging in the western world) while occasionally having a dabble with the camera and inevitably a few calls have to be made.

As a result I changed to a cheaper plan which will hopefully save me a bit of money in the credit crunch era. I thought it would be fairly simple to change my phone for they actually sent me a letter saying I could change it for free as the old model was so out-of-date.

As always though in Japan, it took an age to do this while we went through the lengthy process of confirming all details to an almost-tedious extent. The guy was of course nice enough and as much as I love the service in this country I do sometimes wonder why it takes them so long to ‘make the sale’ as it gets tiring listening to them go through every possible detail and then repeat the process again to confirm. Maybe I am being a bit harsh but I don’t know why some of these transactions take around an hour.