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Garaho vs sumakei

Apparently, according to Japanese Wikipedia, garaho and sumakei are different things:

• Garaho (from garakei + sumaho (clipping of "smartphone")) use the UX of featurephones, and limits background data usage to use less battery.
• Sumakei (from sumaho + keitai) use the UX of normal Android smartphones.

(Japanese carriers stopped releasing sumakei since 2012; some manufacturers still released sumakei after that.)

The distinction doesn't matter for the most part for playing J2ME/Symbian (~S60v3) games. The only point that matter is that, garaho don't have a touchscreen, while sumakei do. Since Google's certification requires a touchscreen, this means garaho can't have GMS installed. Therefore, paid apps on Google Play that use license verification won't be usable on garaho.

This also impacts usage of third-party apps to some extent (varies between apps). Most Android apps aren't designed for keyboard/keypad usage, and as a result, keypad usage is often awkward, confusing, or straight up impossible. On some Sharp and Kyocera phones, the keys are touch-sensitive and can be used as a touchpad. Sharp calls the technology "Touch Cruiser EX", while Kyocera just calls it "pointer". Curiously, Sharp removed this technology from Aquos Keitai 3 onwards, while Kyocera kept this technology even in the latest Digno Keitai 4.

MATVT works as an alternative to this feature, by offering a mouse cursor controllable with the D-Pad. However, dragging the mouse cursor is impossible, and in 1.0.3 (the last version with a build for phones as of October 2024) its "scroll mode" is only usable for scrollable views that don't respond to taps/clicks, as for some reason it sends a click before scrolling. In 1.0.7-pre (the latest version as of October 2024), which only has a "for TV" build, scroll mode doesn't work at all. (Also see this reddit post for using it on Android 11)

Another option is to use a Bluetooth mouse, which allows you to drag in some apps. For some reason, Nova Launcher 8 decided that holding the left mouse button is not the same as holding the touchscreen, making it impossible to execute any dragging action with a mouse. I had to downgrade to Nova 7 because of this.

Product segments

There are three product segments:

• Normal flip phones. Often have enterprise applications built-in.
• Easy phones, for seniors. Called "kantan keitai" by SoftBank and au, and "raku raku hon" by Docomo. They have simplified interfaces and larger fonts.
• Kids phones. They have safety features.

My review(s)

• Aquos Keitai 3 SoftBank aka 805SH

Table

Table of phones

Note: I initially excluded all easy phones and kids phones in this table. I may or may not add them back.

Info source:

• Japanese Wikipedia:
  • au
  • SoftBank
  • Docomo
• Manual download center on official websites of carriers:
  • au
  • SoftBank
  • Docomo (keitai)
  • Docomo (easy)
  • Docomo (kids)