Mobile phones in Japan

sara_h_4

I am shortly travelling to Japan where my husband & I will be separated in the daytime & need to be able to get in touch with each other.
I have been advised by tesco mobile that on my pay as you go motorola razor I just need to scearch for a new network once in japan & I'll be able to use my phone OK. My husbands on contract with Orange & they have told him that no UK phones will work in Japan at all. I know that you can rent phones out there but we would prefer to use our own if possible.
Does anyone have any experience with this ???? :eek:

Colliefrog

Only quad band phones will work out there due to the frequency they use in Japan. The Razr is a quad band, so will work fine out there. You need to find out what band your husbands phone is. If it's dual or tri band it won't work.

Hope this helps :-)

Just checked the Orange site and they do have roaming in Japan for pay monthly customers, so he just needs to check the phone he's using.

redux

All the answers are incomplete or even wrong so far.

You need a phone which has 3g.

It seems the Razr V8 is quadband only, while the V9 also has 3g.

Renting phones might be quite expensive. Without rental, I've read that it's still near impossible for visitors to get a local payg SIM to use in their own phone.

You might look into global roaming SIMs, some of which will have free incoming calls there, and fairly reasonable outgoing rates

Sid_Harper

Renting is cheap actually. When you come out into the airport after security, customs, etc. head to your right and there are (well, used to be 2 years ago) two phone rental kiosks (I used the one next to the bus ticket kiosk - Global-rent-a-phone - though there's one further round the corner too). You can rent a bog-standard 3G phone for your own SIM but the better bet is a local phone.

Basically they have 3G and imode based networks.

I'd grab an Au (Sanyo) flip-phone every visit from Global Rent-a-phone. Nightmare phone to use until you got used to it (they do provide instructions).

I also had a hard time deciphering my credit card statement which said Guroburoentafuon

It worked out at a couple of quid a day and calls within Japan and to other mobiles were very reasonable indeed. This would be my choice for two people to stay in touch with one another whilst there.