There IS a tampon compartment. Its just a secret.

I will admit to being deeply curious as to how the phone knows when you're ovulating. Basal temperature, anybody?

There's a lot about Japanese culture I don't understand -- the hyperviolent, hypersexual comic books, for example. However, I do understand that Japan's population trends (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5132024.stm) are just a tad bit different from ours.

I don't ever expect Traister to think outside her microscopic box, and she didn't fail to disappoint in this case.

Well you've go to give them credit for going out on a limb trying to serve what they think are womens needs. Let the women vote with their yen on that on.

As for ovulating, if you've ever been a single man working in an heavily female environment with low turnover...you know when the women are ovulating. Don't make me spell it out.

I personally would love a phone with an emery board and a secret tampon compartment. Plus which, if you were trying to get pregnant, an ovulation tracker is fine too. What's your problem with this, exactly? Sure, it's a little goofy, but so are a lot of things. :)

I can't read the Japanese product description for myself, so I'm not clear on how this thing works, if you need to input cycle length and other data for it to alert you to your ovulation days, but I'm not grasping what is so ridiculous about this, according to Rebecca Traister and the blogger. As someone who tracked her cycle carefully when trying to conceive, I appreciate handy technology assists to keep tabs on the data. I did it with paper and pen because it wasn't always convenient to turn on the computer to put in the day's entry. To be able to do it on a cute little phone (that also has, uh, phone functions) would have been very handy. And some women track their cycles for other reasons -- to try to avoid getting pregnant, to have knowledge of when to expect a period, and so on.

OK, I get that "cute, pretty, and little" can be viewed as condescending. But surely a tech solution to help you get more information about how your body is working can't be the antifeminist horror that Rebecca seems to think it is.

Neither are they really marketing to the bloggers you found this on.

The target audience probably won't find the colors nauseating, and this is the land of

kawaii (可愛い) after all. Personally I find your take on this silly and offensive.

ACTUAL fertility awarenes/natural family planning is really easy, but it requires very specific daily observations of multiple fertility symptoms. You can't use a computer to tell you when you're ovulating or when your period is coming. This is why the rhythm method doesn't work: it relies on every woman having a cycle that is a set number of days, with presumed ovulation on a certain day of that cycle. And you know what you call people who use the rhythm method of birth control....

I hope this phone has a REALLY BIG RED DISCLAIMER.

This product is part of the Japanese effort to INCREASE their declining birth rate.

The recipe database is a bit much, but otherwise the phone sounds pretty handy to me.

And what's wrong with it being pink? Broadsheet is pink!!

There are plenty of software programs out there now to assist you with tracking your cycle, and can even predict, with some accuracy, when you are ovulating and when your period will start. It's VERY straightforward, programmatically.

And the software is handy. I'm sterile (by choice), but I still want to know when I need to break out the tampons, and when to take my evening primrose oil and such (take it the week before my period to help ease the pain). I have a little application on my PDA, which means I can easily predict when I'm going to get it, so I can plan when to have my annual pap smear (you want it right around when you ovulate). And once you've got the baseline data, if you're even somewhat regular, it's accurate--I've double-checked, as I can tell when I ovulate rather easily.

As for a secret tampon compartment--excellent idea, bring it on! Receipe file--hey, there are times I'm at the store, wanting to cook something, but have no idea what ingredients I need, in what proportion. Could come in handy.

Pastel colors? Some people like 'em. Whatever. If they had lavendar, that's a shade of purple, I'm happy.

And small size--hey, the smaller, the better. I carry small purses so I don't weigh down my shoulder and give myself a neck ache/headache. I don't want my phone and PDA to be the same device, they're too awkward to use. So small==good.

And Japanese==kawaii. I've got three words that sum that up. Hello. Kitty. Vibrator.

This is one article I really don't agree with.

Sorry to nitpick but...

I looked at the DoCoMo site and found that the phone doesn't actually tell you when you're ovulating, it tells you when to expect your next period.

You input the date of your last period and the average length of your cycle and the phone predicts the date of your next period. It warns you three days in advance and on the day your period is due.

And according to DoCoMo, the fake ring isn't there to deter 'losers', it's for when you're walking alone at night so you can pretend you are speaking to someone (apparently making you less likely to be attacked).

I've actually used a rental phone in Japan with a mysterious button labeled "mira-" in katakana... When I touched it, the display turned off, and I wondered why.

I asked a friend about this "mira-" function and she pointed out that when you touch it you can use the screen as a mirror.

It turned out the display was coated with a reflective material that works fairly well once the display is off.