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0xfaded | 3 months ago

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

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parl_match|3 months ago

yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam

japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.

but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet

Lutzb|3 months ago

I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).

edbaskerville|3 months ago

In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).

In 1993.

onlyhumans|3 months ago

Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly to other Zunes, it was called squirting

tempfile|3 months ago

That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"

vel0city|3 months ago

My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.

ehnto|3 months ago

I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.