In Japan, phones have been capable of turn-by-turn navigation for a long time. When those apps first came out, there was a lot of speculation about whether mobile phone navi would kill the standalone / built-in navigation market. The car navi folks rushed to add mobile data connectivity, so they could download the latest maps and service info to compete with the "live" services offered by the mobile phones. Accessories for mounting your phone in the car in a visible position also became available.

In the end, both devices are co-existing in the market and very few people use the phone as the primary navigation device. Reasons are: (1) Inconvenience of having to launch the app, mount the phone in the car (or kill your phone's battery), and the fact that you can't use your phone. (2) Screen size. Unlike the tiny screens on North American GPS navi units, almost all units in Japan have a 5" or 7" screen. (3) The fact that most cars already have it built in anyway.

So I predict that in North America, the GPS navi units will evolve to: (1) Larger screens, (2) Data connectivity for live updates, and (3) More specialized features and improved service quality. The competition will be good. But the standalone / built-in navi devices won't just disappear.

Seriously, come to Canada. You'll enjoy a quality of life equal or better than that of the States, similar work / leisure culture, and an immigration process that's much more deterministic than the INS one. Information Technology has been a designated occupation in many provinces for a long time -- for example, in British Columbia you could get your permanent residency in six months through its provincial nominee programme.

I sound like a salesman to Canada but I have US citizenship and voluntarily immigrated to Canada the hard way, for what it's worth.

You don't HAVE to pay first-world prices for those things; that's what the global marketplace is all about. The catch is, you don't "have" to get a first-world salary, either.

But let's get this straight. Foreign students pay higher tuition fees. That's why colleges are so keen to get international students and their money. Of course, many of them come from places where the income level isn't high enough to afford those inflated fees, so they have to earn it through work-study or merit-based scholarships. But far from being "massively subsidized", "they" are actually subsidizing YOUR education through international student tuition.

Globalization is a bitch, isn't it?

If any of you are looking for laptops for serious color accurate work then you might be interested in this article:

http://www.markzware.com/blogs/top-5-laptops-for-displaying-color-gamut/2008/10/14/

The linked article is an extremely misinformed one. Among other nonsenses, it says that 16 million colors equates to 96% of "the" color gamut, which makes about as much sense as ... (here comes the auto analogy) ... saying my minivan makes as much horsepower as a Porsche because they both have six cylinders.

I'm honestly shocked at how the writer could be so misinformed and yet purport to offer a buying guide for laptop screens. The original article is much more useful.

Basically, you can think of the phone as a user interface to your credit card. So you can check your balances and usage history easily, have multiple cards on the same phone (and manage them on the phone), and do all kinds of weird stuff like pick up coupons from NFC readers around town, and log in to karaoke machines with your favourite songs.

As you say, right now, the advantages of mobile phone NFC versus a plain old NFC-enabled credit card are presently sorta marginal. In Japan the majority of people use static cards instead of the mobile phone version. But as the services start to expand and the marketing geniuses figure out how to eek some benefit out of this system, I think you'll see the adoption rate increasing.

Some things that are essential when designing such a system are: ability to use the payment system even when the device is out of battery, recovery and transfer of the user IDs to another device, and remote disabling. Somehow, I doubt the US based folks have gotten their heads around these very important aspects yet.

I was about to reply and say, "what rock have you been living under?!" The payment terminals are simply everywhere in Tokyo; you can't miss em.

But the parent has a point: in rural and more old-fashioned areas of Japan, it's true that NFC payment systems are a bit more rare and cash is generally preferred. The exceptions are the national chain stores and convenient stores, which accept NFC payments, but for a rural resident, there might not be enough "critical" mass of stores to justify signing up.

So here we have another article that says Japan is somehow unique, homogeneous and therefore "easy" to set up NFC payments. But that's a rather flawed and tired excuse. The NFC payment systems in Japan are just as fragmented as anywhere else, with lots of mutually incompatible systems (Seven-Eleven being a prime example, accepting only their homegrown "nanaco" card). The difference is that the hardware aspects are all based on the FeLiCa standard, thus, much as different protocols can run over Ethernet, you don't need to invest in various mutually incompatible hardware sets.

People outside of Japan should follow this model too. First decide on a widely compatible communication standard (FeLiCa is a decent one and already used internationally) and then let the various billing companies fight it out.