Today I bought a sofa, a desk, a coffee table, a stack of curtains, an umbrella "bin", a gyoza pan, 2 cups of starbucks latte and 2 bottles of leffe blonde beer as a farewell to my home.

I'm sad but excited at the same time. My longest home yet ends tonight.

This is my last Monday, this week is the last of everything in my current digs. Moving next Monday to my new home.

I'm sad yet excited.

New home, new opportunities. Further to town.

Oh well you can't have everything.

The answer is of course you can!

The ironic thing is your iPhone will work better in Japan because you will be able to roam and use docomo's network, which is far superior to the crappy service that Softbank provide.

Now if you have an unlocked iPhone, things get a bit more interesting.

You can go to either Softbank or docomo store and ask to get a sim card for the iPhone. These are different to Japanese sim cards, not physically but some hardware way.

Subscribing to Softbank is pretty easy, you get a sim card, choose the white plan and data plan (there is only one data plan), then decide if you want the additional services.  For what it's worth - I have the full enchilada and the iPhone costs me around ¥10000/m it has only gone well over that when I sent a ton of SMS messages to international destinations (won't be doing that again).

You could choose docomo (I just got off the phone to them). They are less than forthcoming with information on using an unlocked phone on their network.  First of all - it depends on the shop. The lass told me to go to an official docomo shop and have them ring the international service desk to get the questions answered.  She also told me some services might not work, or if they do work I would be charged higher rates for it.  Secretly I suspect you could buy an android or blackberry phone, subscribe to the data service, take the sim card out and slip it into you iPhone and bingo you are up and running - it is an experiment I would like to try.

I don't know what docomo would charge for the sim card but Softbank charge just shy of ¥3000.

Why?

Because I couldn't purchase Kindle books. Stupid international copyright or whatever the deal was, it was stopping me from buying books from the Amazon Kindle Store.

Yes, I had read about a workaround, which actually wasn't that difficult, but I didn't want to bother with it badly enough. And so I thought that was that.

Till today, when Amazon announced Kindle International. I quickly logged on and ordered myself a Kindle. My order stands and to be honest I'm not really sure if I am going to proceed with it.  Really I want the DX and I'm also a bit hopeful that early next year Apple will release something totally awesome that will make the Kindle redundant.

But anyway - that got me thinking, Kindle is now available internationally and you have to have an American Amazon account to use it, that means that international restrictions would be removed. So I tried shopping and it worked. So now I have a Kindle book (the Sookie Stackhouse Series) on my iPhone.  Excellent.

Currently I think this is what you need: 

An American iTunes account (to get the Kindle app) it is not currently available on the Australian iTS (although maybe that will change).

An American Amazon account (to buy kindle books).

That's it.

I bought the book on the Amazon website (via the desktop not through the iPhone).

Told Amazon to send it to my iPhone

Turned on the iPhone Kindle and in a few moments there it was.

I started reading immediately. Too easy.

Now I have the iPhone Kindle reader.. I think I might hold out for the Kindle DX or the tablet from Apple.