NYT does keitai

At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators...

...“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it”...

"...conflict between Japan’s advanced hardware and its primitive software..."NYT

I'd say that requiring over 15-18 keystrokes (many of them repetitive confirmations of previous steps) to open and send a single e-mail might have something to do with some of these phones being a purely domestic product. And just try to take and save a "photo" with my DoCoMo clunker. Got a week to enter all the keystrokes and confirmations? Good. Add another for shutter lag. It does have a lot of useless features, although I still have not completely read my nearly 300 page manual to find out what I am missing.

Then again, with decent software and interface, surely they could take on that heavy why-all-the-fuss iPhone. Unfortunately, my experience with Japanese PCs and their reliance on over-priced gimmicky hardware with obsolete specs, and the generally very, very poorly made Japanese software that I have used, does not give me much confidence in that area.

(I am at a loss on the "surprisingly bulky" comment in the article in reference to Japanese cell phones. US or European phones are nowadays smaller?)