HooshM And to a further extent, any hope for FeliCa support on the CMF Phone 1.
Why is FeliCa important to me?
I have been to Japan for tourism five times, and there is a chronic shortage of Suica/PASMO cards in Tokyo. The railway companies there advised passengers to use Mobile Suica; however, only Android phones sold in Japan, save for the Nothing Phone(2a) (not available to the general public in the US but is available for general purchase in Japan) and all Pixel phones since Pixel 6/6 Pro. Even if you do own a modern Google Pixel, there is this region lock preventing users outside Japan to set up Osaifu-keitai (a technology required to use FeliCa technologies like Mobile Suica) to ride trains, buses, and subways, as well as to buy drinks from vending machines and play games at some arcades. And even then, you need a Japan-issued credit/debit card to add credit to your Android phone’s Suica balance.
On every modern iPhone (2017 and up globally), they have got Mobile Suica support to work on iPhones sold outside Japan by allowing users with foreign credit/debit cards to top up an iPhone’s Suica balance, making it easy to add credit to a Suica card before one even lands in Japan.
It will require the efforts of Google and Nothing to bring FeliCa support to all Nothing Phone(3) users, regardless of where they bought the phone, as the railway companies are failing to resolve this chronic Suica/PASMO card shortage.
