シンクコール (Sync Call)

» see au.com/mobile/service/list/end/sync-call as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2015 the chat app on my phone was whatever the people I needed to reach were already using, and in Turkey that meant WhatsApp. Turkcell and Avea had long since lost the argument about who gets to invent the way you talk to a friend, and so had every carrier I knew of. Japan was still having it, and KDDI put real money behind its side.

KDDI announced Sync Call on 27 October 2014 at its winter handset event, as one of two services riding on au VoLTE. Koji Tanaka, the president at the time, was blunt about the reasoning. All three carriers now sold the iPhone, he said, and people were asking what the difference between them was supposed to be anymore. Leaving VoLTE as nothing but better-sounding calls, he said, would not be interesting. The launch itself had Shuzo Matsuoka serving a ceremonial first ball, which tells you roughly how the company wanted the thing received.

The basic part arrived in early December 2014 as a replacement voice interface, something that sat under the phone rather than on top of it. A call coming in while you were reading a web page left you on the web page. Once you answered, the controls shrank to a small ball you could push aside, so the phone stayed usable during the call. The interesting half, the sync functions, had been scheduled for February 2015 and shipped a little early, on 29 January, on the Sharp AQUOS SERIE mini that went on sale the same day and by update on the isai VL and the URBANO V01.

~ the case file ~

~ four kinds of sync ~

Screen sync put what was on your display onto the other handset, sound included, so two people could look through photos together while talking about them. Camera sync relayed what your camera was pointed at in real time, which KDDI's own copy suggested using for scenery on a trip or for checking a product while you were out shopping. Location sync dropped both of you onto a map, for the case where you are on the phone trying to find each other in a place neither of you knows. Handwriting sync let either side draw on the shared screen, so you could underline the sentence you were arguing about or doodle on the photo.

The whole thing was free and needed no application form. On a compatible handset it was simply there. The catch was in the small print and it was fatal: the sync half needed both parties to be holding an au VoLTE smartphone, and it worked one to one on Android only. You also needed an LTE NET subscription, and the person receiving a sync was charged for the data too, so a feature you never asked for could quietly cost you money.

~ the mystery that was left ~

KDDI pushed it hard for a while. In March 2015 there was a user-participation puzzle event in Shibuya built around the service, with Yoshio Kojima and Nana Suzuki fronting it. That December there was a demo line you could Sync Call to reach Otohime, the princess of the Dragon Palace from the Urashima Taro story. None of it moved the number that mattered.

On 21 December 2017 KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced that Sync Call would end on 26 June 2018, citing a decline in users. From April 2018 the people still on it got an SMS with the closure notice and a suggestion of what to use instead. Voice Party, the paid sibling announced in the same 2014 release that let thirty people talk at once, had already been scheduled to close that March. The plain call function survived, because it was always just the dialer. Reporting on the shutdown, Keitai Watch ran a photo of the Shibuya puzzle event with a caption saying the riddle of the falling user count was left unsolved.

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