Japan's wireless networks have a longstanding, legendary reputation for existing in some parallel plane that's technologically light years ahead of the rest of the world, but that reputation's unquestionably in greater danger today than in any point in the past fifteen years. Why? Though the featurephones offered by NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI are ultra high-spec beasts, they're still featurephones at the end of the day -- and this comes at a time when smartphones are finally becoming true cultural phenomena across the remainder of the developed world (and, in some cases, the developing world).
There's no greater
