S! Onajimi Sousa (S!おなじみ操作)

~ the obituary ~

It was a downloadable file that rearranged a menu. You pulled it onto the handset and the top-level grid of icons, the ordering, the whole feel of pressing down and across to reach your inbox, rewrote itself to match a different phone. Its first name was just Onajimi Sousa, which means something like "familiar operation", and the S! prefix came later when SoftBank put that mark on everything it sold.

The reason it existed has a date on it. Japan switched on mobile number portability on 24 October 2006, letting subscribers carry their number from one of the three operators to another for the first time. Carrier email addresses did not come along, so what you kept was the number and nothing else. SoftBank had the worst of that opening week, reporting a net loss of 23,900 subscribers while KDDI claimed a gain of over a hundred thousand, and on 25 November it released the 911SH, the second AQUOS handset, with this service attached.

The clever part was the direction it pointed. Plenty of phones let you reskin their own menus. This one could imitate the layouts of the competition, and of the Vodafone-era handsets SoftBank had inherited when it bought Vodafone Japan earlier that same year. It then spread down the catalog, through the 810P and the 812SH and the 813SH, the 912SH, the 820P through the 823P, and most of what came after.

~ the case file ~

~ the phone the operator owned ~

None of this was possible where I was. In Turkey in 2006 the phone in your pocket was overwhelmingly a Nokia, and the menu was Nokia's menu, identical on Turkcell and on Avea, because the operator had no say in it at all. You changed networks and the handset did not notice. The idea that your carrier designed the thing you moved through every day, and that switching carriers therefore meant relearning your own phone, was a Japanese condition rather than a universal one.

That is also why there was nothing to miss here. The 911SH never went on sale in Turkey and neither did the problem it solved. I came to this one as a historical object, from a Japanese encyclopedia entry, which is the only way it was ever going to reach me.

~ muscle memory as a feature ~

What SoftBank had correctly identified is that a phone menu is learned rather than read. After two years with a handset nobody looks at the screen to find the message folder, the thumb goes there. Portability gave people permission to switch and then handed them a device that made their hands wrong for a month, and the churn that caused was a real commercial problem dressed up as a usability one. The fix was not to design a better menu. It was to ship somebody else's.

~ the last settings file ~

Service ended on 31 October 2009, two years and eleven months after the 911SH went on sale. The notice said what stopped was the ability to download new settings files, and that anyone who had already downloaded one could carry on using it indefinitely.

So this is a shutdown that left no visible mark on a single user. Every phone that was wearing another carrier's menu on 30 October was still wearing it on 1 November, and will be wearing it in whatever drawer it ended up in, for as long as the battery holds. No reason for the closure was published. By 2009 the portability panic was three years old and the handsets it had been designed to argue with were gone anyway.

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