iPhone pricing announced

So the iPhone 3G pricing has been announced by the SoftBank folks. The basic breakdown for the representative plan described on that page:

Handset price: ¥23,040 for 8GB, ¥34,560 for 16GB (paid in ¥960 or ¥1,440 monthly payments over the course of the two-year plan).

iPhone.pngService price: ¥7,280 a month (including the ¥980 White Plan, which includes free calls from 1 a.m. to 9 p.m. to other SoftBank numbers; the fixed-price [unmetered?] data plan for ¥5,985; and the S! Basic Pack, which costs ¥315 and isn’t really described on that page).

Not a horrible deal, all in all, considering what was being predicted for this thing. Still, if you do a lot of telephoning the charges will stack up quickly: SoftBank gives you a great deal on calls to other SoftBank users, but makes you fork over north of ¥20 per minute to all other mobile and fixed-line numbers. Email is free to and from all addresses (you get an @i.softbank.jp address with the thing, but of course you can use all your webmail as usual) and SMS doesn’t exist in this country.

Now to decide whether I really want to ditch the DoCoMo set and jump into the Apple end of the mobile phone pool . . .

06/23/2008 | Japan, tech | 3 Comments

DoCoMo talks about iPhone failure

TechRadar UK has a piece up with quotes from an NTT DoCoMo spokesman on yesterday’s news: DoCoMo failed to nab iPhone.

DoCoMo has admitted to TechRadar it tried and failed to strike a deal with Apple to sell the 3G iPhone in Japan. . . .

[Ichikoshi Shûichirô says] “Anyway, DoCoMo already sells touchscreen phones, such as the Prada phone and the SH906i, which came out yesterday.”

I saw one of those Prada phones in Yodobashi the other day. Not a bad looking thing, in its iPhonish way, but it markets for more than ninety freaking thousand yen. Yeah. Good luck with that.

06/05/2008 | Japan, tech | No Comments

SoftBank iPhone: confirmed

I was just pointed to this SoftBank press release from today. I quote:

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.

(Seriously, that’s the entire press release; you don’t really have to go read it now.)

I’m happy to see the thing on its way to Japan at last. I’m thinking about making it my next cellphone—not for its great wifi action, since free wifi isn’t a common thing to find in this city in my experience, but because it’s the first phone ever that I can be sure will sync up nicely with my Mac computers.

What Japan Thinks has a good post up here on the iPhone and its prospects in this market. The piece is almost a year old but is worth looking at just the same.

06/04/2008 | Japan, tech | 3 Comments

More SWET posting &c.

In the “web” category:

A few quick links to things I wrote on that other site:

One, two, three . . . (on Ryan Ginstrom’s online and downloadable word-and-character-counting utilities)

Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money (on, well, Facebook and the translation of its interface)

Guerrilla editing on the road (on the wild adventures of the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League)

In the “life” category:

Sakura is an active, active girl. She gets us up anywhere from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning, and when she is up it’s definitely time for us all to be awake, feeding her and playing with her and reading her books. She loves to spend time outside, which will be a challenge to deal with once the summer heat hits in earnest. Putting shoes on is the sign that it’s time to visit the great outdoors, and shoes are therefore among her favorite things these days.

In the “work” category:

Japan Echo lost in the bidding for a Cabinet Office publication that would have meant an extra 50 pages or so of translation and layout each month. Mixed feelings here: the job would have helped the company’s bottom line, but it would have been a brutal pace at which to write and edit, and bureaucrats in the central government aren’t known for their appreciation of finely crafted phrases. We would have had to take on more help for the project and we wouldn’t have enjoyed much of it. So . . . whew?

In place of that it looks like we’ll be busy in July, at least, doing on-site work at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. Eight years ago I went to Miyazaki and Okinawa for the G8 foreign ministers’ and leaders’ meetings. Sat in tiny, insufficiently air-conditioned rooms and translated or proofed little blurbs of text to go out on the media info system. The work should be the same this time around, more or less, but a full eight-year cycle in the G8 process brings with it a whole lot of technological advances in the meantime, so I don’t think my dim memories of how to key the press releases in that old system will help much with whatever Hakuhodo sets up this time around. Prep meetings begin next week. We’ll see.

05/28/2008 | life, web, work | No Comments

SWET posting

A short post to link to a couple of posts I did over at the SWET blog: Learn the language, stay a while longer, on the possibility that Japanese language ability will let you get a work visa good for five years instead of three, and The translation problem solved again, which talks about the automated handheld translation system of the week. Read, enjoy, etc. etc.

05/08/2008 | translation, web | No Comments