Crikey! Seems Australia is experiencing a massive overload in terms of personal gadgets and the sort. According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, as of June 30th, 2007 about 21.26 million cellphones were in operation. A respectable number, but surely not enough to dwarf an entire population, right?

Nadda. As of September 30th, 2007, Australia’s population as a whole was 21.1 million. At this rate, every Kangaroo is poised to have an iPhone in its pouch by 2013. Addiction to technology at its finest? You betcha.

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Japan’s largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo announced this morning that for the first time in the world, they have managed a 100% population 3G coverage with their WCDMA network. The last 2 villages with reception towers installed are both in Okinawa, where they don’t even speak proper Japanese. The towers will be powered up on Mar28. Take note that this is only population coverage but not area coverage, but you can expect that there’ll be 3G signals as long as there is a village. (We have no way to assess DoCoMo’s definition of a “village”) The company will continue to expand their coverage area (in rural areas) with the new 1.7Ghz band that they obtained from the government, on top of the ongoing HSDPA upgrading. You can call NTT obsessive for building towers in places where nobody uses cellphones anyway, but don’t forget that a lot of so-called developed countries don’t even have a satisfactory 2G coverage, cough ATT cough Vodafone. –Sam Chan

Press release [NTT DoCoMo]