KDDI going to the US?

Reuters reports that KDDI is planing to set up camp in the US, as KDDI mobile, using the Sprint CDMA network.

Cool! As long as I can afford it, I would really love to use Japanese phones out of Japan. Imagine a reasonably sized clamshell phone with a humongous high-def screen, real HTML web browser with Flash support, usable good quality camera, office doc readers, fully functional music player, built-in e-wallet and more. Oh, and the "push e-mail" that's all the rage in the US was so last century in Japan that it's expected to be part of any basic phone: nothing to write home about. If KDDI really provided all that in the US at a reasonable price, many people will be switching from clumsy "smart phones" to easy-to-use, better functioning Japanese feature phones. That would be a big hit to Palm, Blackberry and many others.

Yet, if they went the route of Helio (partly owned by Koreans), charging high fees that people aren't willing to pay, then they would become a niche player that nobody but uber-geeks (or, in business jargon, "pro-sumers") would care about. It would be the Japanese and Koreans fighting it off in the US for a tiny market no one cares about.

No matter how good the phones are, if the prices aren't affordable, then no one cares, just as what Helio achived.