Locale. Automatically changes phone settings based on triggers. What this means is that you can set your phone to automatically go to vibrate at work or at the movie theater, and to automatically increase (or mute) its volume during the hours when your normally sleep.

Compare Everywhere. Scan a barcode with the phone’s camera and get instant results on the lowest prices for that item in the local area.

Cooking Capsules. Cooking instruction from shopping through serving using text, photos and video. I am hopeless at cooking; something like this will be invaluable. Things like this have existed on the internet before, but it’s been socially awkward to try to use a laptop in the store or at the stove.

PebbleBox. A social platform focusing on the integrated GPS and maps. Anyone can publish events, attractions, and posts about a particular location.

Piggyback. An impromptu carpool management system, complete with automatic paypal-backed fares.

Cab4me. Call a taxi anywhere in the world without speaking a word. This app uses the maps and GPS features well; the cab can be called to your current location with a single click, and you can select your destination on the map. Taxis are a rare expense for me, but invaluable when I need them.

PedNav. For use in cities, it generates walking and public-transit based routes and itineraries between arbitrary points. It also includes a system for browsing nearby venues for a number of types of attraction.

Of course, the cool part is that all these and others will be available for free from the launch date, and the only thing anyone else needs to post their own app is a free signup as an app developer. This all adds up to unprecedented flexibility. Say you’re a hardware manufacturer and you want to sell a flash that clamps onto the phone and is controlled through the USB port. There is absolutely no reason you could not do this. When anyone can post code, and everyone has access to the entire OS, everyone wins.

I got lucky, though. In my Japanese class in college, there was a woman named Sarah. By lucky coincidence, she grew up maybe half an hour from my hometown, she attended the same Japanese class that I did, and most importantly, she was part of a student exchange program that put her in Tokyo the same year that I was in the next prefecture over. She was pretty. She was friendly. She was engaged. Actually seeing her took some effort, as we were about 100 minutes from each other by train, but the prospect of conversation unencumbered by inhibition made the journey worth my while.

Every few months, then, I would arrange to go do something with her. We went to an amusement park; we went to explore Yokohama; we celebrated an American-style Thanksgiving with her homestay parents; we did many things. Most of those events remain only as snapshot memories from which I derive the rest of the occasion, but one really stands out in my mind: the road trip.

It was early spring, and we both wanted to try something beyond typical tourist attractions, something that would get both of us to a part of Japan that neither had seen before. We decided to rent a car in Tokyo and drive north to a natural hot spring resort in the mountains of Nagano. The area gets few non-Japanese tourists, and it seemed a good way to get a bit more immersion than usual. Renting a car in Tokyo was easy to accomplish, and reserving a room in a ryokan, a Japanese-style small inn, was only slightly more difficult. Everything seemed like it was going to be easy.

Driving in Tokyo is crazy, but not really all that much more crazy than driving in Boston or New York. It turns out to be really easy to adapt to driving on the left side of the road; the only hard part to adapt to was the fact that the windshield wiper and blinker switches were on opposite sides from what I expect. The road signs were rare and usually incomprehensible, but it was for that reason that we had reserved a car with a built-in GPS unit. We hit a small snag when we realized that neither of us could understand the GPS interface well enough to actually program in our destination, but we did what anyone would: we pulled into a gas station, showed the address of our destination and the GPS unit, said “onegai” (please) and “wakarimasen” (we don’t understand) a lot, and gave our best puppy-dog eyes. The station attendant was friendly, as every service-industry employee in Japan is, and pushed a lot of buttons on the screen and then it was showing arrows and a colored line projecting from our current location. We thanked him, and drove.

I am skeptical of the notion that any two people together in a confined space will of necessity become friends. That trip, though, tested my skepticism. Sarah and I didn’t have a whole lot in common beyond a shared interest in Japan and Japanese, but we found that in that car, we could just talk. Somehow, hours of what would have been tedious cross-country driving alone became vibrant and enjoyable. We noted the scenery when it was remarkable–surprisingly often, it was–but other than that, time just seemed to vanish.

In retrospect, there were plenty of hints that the GPS wasn’t taking us where we expected to go. The gas-station man had said quite a bit, actually; we just couldn’t understand much of it. As we ascended the mountains of central Japan, there was quite a bit of snow, but we passed a point in the early afternoon when the snow started going away. There was the fact that, hours after we had expected to have arrived, we were still on the highway with quite a long strip of hilighted road showing on the GPS. Despite all that, both of us were surprised when we saw a rare English-translated road sign: “Welcome to Niigata City.” Shortly after that, we discovered a beach. We had driven clear across Japan en route to its center.

There really wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that except laugh. We played on the beach of the Sea of Japan; we ate dinner, and then we went off to find a more competent gas-station man. Accomplishing that, we set out and drove again.

By the time we arrived and checked into the ryokan, it was well after dark and there was no hope of catching any of the attractions we had planned originally to see that day. There was no time to waste on a weekend trip though, so we asked the owner if there was anything interesting still open. He shrugged, and pointed us to an izakaya, which is more or less a Traditional Japanese Pub.

Imagine a Pub in the romantic sense: it is the relaxation area of the common man, where the locals of a town will gather each night to unwind. It is a place of joviality and games, and the friendly atmosphere of the working folk of a small town who have all known each other forever. Now, make it Japanese: beer is beer the world around, but instead of darts, there is karaoke. Instead of wood paneling and hunting trophies on the wall, there are tatami mats on the floor and calligraphy on the walls. Best of all, instead of hostile locals suspicious of any outsider, the people there were delighted to talk to foreigners, to buy us drinks, to compete with us in karaoke. It was a fascinating night.

The next day, we visited a natural hot spring in the area, known for having been discovered and first used by monkeys. The thing about monkeys is that no matter how often they bathe in a hot spring, they still make the whole area smell like monkey residue. We visited and touristed around for a while, and then we headed back for the long drive back to Tokyo.

The overwhelming majority of the time that weekend was spent in the car. We spent more driving time to vacation time on that trip than on perhaps any other trip of my life. Despite all that, despite the unanticipated addition of hours of driving, I can’t say that that time was wasted. Quite the contrary: it is rare to spend so much time in one go in a state of perfect companionship. Those hours of driving are a treasure in my memory.

The last weekend of this month has come and gone, and I can say with certainty that this is not a trip I will forget soon.

It started with a rental car. One of the strongest guidelines when planning this trip was that it was to be cheap; neither my friend nor I wanted to spend more than was absolutely necessary, because near the end of the month both our budgets were stretching. There was a cheap ryokan with an onsen* (~$40 per person per night) a reasonable distance out, but it would cost $80 per person for a five hour train ride on the local trains, or $120 for a shorter ride on the shinkansen. Luckily, I discovered that it’s possible to rent a car for the weekend for only $80, so in theory we could actually pull off the entire trip for under $100 per person, which seemed reasonable.

Driving in Japan, in general, is not actually as big a transition as I had expected. It’s not very difficult to stay on the proper side of the road, and road signs are generally easy to understand, at least on such issues as the speed limit, one way roads, and general traffic control. The biggest issue is that the blinker lever and the windshield wiper lever are on opposite sides of the steering wheel; all too often, I would attempt to signal a turn and set the wipers in motion instead.

The car rental place with the good deal, however, was located in the middle of Tokyo. Driving in Tokyo is not pleasant. It’s got the congestion of New York, the street layout of Boston, and it occupies a larger area than either of those. Furthermore, the signage with respect to major roads is ambiguous and confusing, even though major words are listed in roman characters. After about 90 minutes of general confusion trying to find the proper highway out of the city, we pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant to program the car’s GPS route-planner for us**. Luckily enough, the attendant there was very helpful and friendly, and after about five minutes of fiddling with the controls he had the GPS displaying a dotted line of arrows along the intended route. He conveyed that he hadn’t put in our exact destination, but an approximation which should serve until we were closer to the destination and could get someone else to reprogram the GPS for us.

With the help of the GPS and its associated software, we soon made it out of the city and on our way. By 2pm, we arrived at the end point of the GPS’ programmed route, and sought out another person to reprogram the GPS. To our great dismay, we discovered that we were in Niigata–on the coast of the Japan sea, about twice as far as the ryokan. We had assumed that the gas station man had programmed an intermediate destination; he had instead sent us to the endpoint of the correct highway.

There wasn’t much to do at that point except curse the gas station man soundly, play in the ocean a bit, and turn around. After another four hours of scenic Japanese highway***, we finally made it to the ryokan, where we were delighted to be greeted in person by the proprietor, who spoke quite good English. After we were checked in and settled, we headed to a nearby izakaya**** for dinner, and maybe drinks. As it turned out, gaijin were a rarity in that place, and the locals were happy to buy us sake while we sang american songs at the karaoke machine and chatted with them in whatever combination of English and Japanese we could muster between the lot of us.

The next day, we headed out to the nearby wildlife park to see the snow monkeys cavorting in the natural hot springs. While there was a large colony of monkeys in the park, they seemed reluctant to enter the water until the park attendant threw some food in, at which point there was a mob.

The monkey park was at the end of a path of decent length up the side of a mountain. Across a small valley, there was an onsen for people based on the same hot springs. I must say it was much more enjoyable than the artificial onsen at the ski place, in large part because there was almost nobody else there. The indoor bath was comfortable, but what really made this onsen memorable was the outdoor bath. Apparently, though the practice becomes rarer as time passes and as population densities increase, it was common at one point for onsen to be mixed-gender installations. This practice has not entirely died out. Though the indoor baths were segregated at the baths near the monkey park, both indoor baths had doors leading to the same outdoor bath. That would have been easy for me to deal with, particularly as the mixing of genders was entirely theoretical while I was there; there were no women in attendance. What made the experience hair-raising was the fact that the outdoor bath was situated such that one had a magnificent view of the mountain across the valley, and the path up it–and all the people on the path had an equally unobstructed view of the bathers.

I did try the outdoor bath, reasoning that this was not a chance that would present itself to many people, and I would rather preserve my adventurousness than my modesty. That said, I watched carefully and made sure that there was nobody on the path before venturing between the indoor bath and the outdoor. There was one guy, however, who had no such qualms. He was standing outside the outdoor bath, stretching, relaxing, and enjoying the view. When I first ventured out, he said in decent English that the water there was too hot for him; apparently, he was not going to let this spoil his enjoyment of the outdoor scenery. At one point, he waved to someone on the path, standing tall so as not to be missed.

I didn’t stay in the outdoor bath for very long.

After walking back from the onsen, it was time for us to head back to Tokyo. We would have had a pretty smooth time of it, as it was simplistic to tell the GPS “lead us home.” However, traffic on the way into the city was inexplicably dense for a Sunday evening, and we lost an hour and a half in the jams.

Last weekend was an adventure of the sort that I’ve grown up reading about and wishing to have. Yes, we were lost most of the time, spent four times as much as we meant to*****, and had an itinerary meager enough that just reading about it is undoubtedly making the more planning-oriented members of my family cringe. At the same time, it was time spent in enjoyable company, doing interesting things (at least while we weren’t driving). It felt full, and satisfying. In particular, the whole thing felt like a more authentic experience than I expect most people have. I’ve stayed in high-class hotels in both the western and the japanese style, and I’ve done most of the touristy things to do in Japan. I’m not going to complain about comfort, luxury, or style, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a sanitized vision of Japan presented to tourists. Going on this trip, I feel like I’ve peeked behind the curtain, and seen the sort of thing that I would as a native. Being able to say that is immensely satisfying.