Take one super-knowledgable smartphone fan, steeped in Symbian especially. Put him in Japan and then throw every cutting edge tech demo and every flagship newcomer from NTT DoCoMo at him - and let him take as many photos as he wanted. The result is a great illustrated read from Clinton Jeff, looking at both Symbian-powered and proprietary phones and smartphones, plus a number of new technologies - as usual, some of these will be standard in the rest of the world in a few years time.

A two day trip by Tata Docomo, we were invited to not only check out the land that only has the latest technology in the world, but is also the homebase of NTT Docomo. As you might already know, Tata Docomo is India’s fourth largest operator in terms of wireless subscribers (about 32.82 million users at the end of June 2010), after Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and Vodafone. They became quite popular with the introduction of the charge-per-second pulse, and on November 5th 2010, became the first private sector telecom company to launch 3G services in India.

The Network provider is a joint venture between India’s Tata Group, and Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo, who hold 26% stake in the company. NTT Docomo, is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. Heck, they are so large, that even the name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, “do communications over the mobile network“. Symbian Fans might note that they are also a founding member of the Symbian Foundation.

I’ve always wanted to visit Japan. Ever since I saw my first Gundam episode, and found out that Sega (and hence Sonic the Hedgehog) was based out of the island. Japan is widely known, as the geek’s dream country, and hence, being a very proud fellow-geek, I was overjoyed to check out the land of the rising sun.

More in the full piece.