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.
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by iPhone - Tips and Tricks » Blog Archive » SoftBank iPhone: confirmed
04 Jun 2008 at 23:28
[...] Durf placed an interesting blog post on SoftBank iPhone: confirmedHere’s a brief overviewSOFTBANK 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.) … [...]
by foomfoom
05 Jun 2008 at 02:30
I’m thrilled to see this on it’s way finally. Not that I think I’ll get one at this stage (I’m far too attached to the classic flip style phone), but Japanese cell phone’s really need an OS overhaul. They are slow and clunky and have aged extraordinarily poorly considering the hardware these things are running on. Using something like the iPod Touch Safari browser, and then loading up Opera on my cell phone is like night and day. Like a nice apple pie and a kick to the junk. I hope the iPhone catches a big enough market that other makers take a look at it and realize that not only is it okay to revamp their phones’ UI, but its about 6 years overdue.
I think that article is spot on in regards of what Apple needs to bring to the table. First thing that jumps out at me is text input. There definitely needs to be a 10 key style input with a decent predictive UI. On my iPod Touch (1.1.2) Japanese input is all but unusable. Get ATOK or something running on it.
Can’t forget the strap either. In Japan, it’s not a phone if there’s no place to hang crap from.
One-seg, mobile IC credit etc I think would be nice, but I don’t think not having them is a deal breaker for their target audience.
It should have IR, though I would be shocked if it did. I’ll never forget the 11 months I had a phone with bluetooth instead of IR. Whenever it came time to exchange contact info, I had to start apologizing. No, I don’t have IR, I have bluetooth…It’s much better…I swear… Though lack of IR isn’t going to curb many sales either.
I won’t pretend I have any clue of just how well (or not) the iPhone is going to do in Japan. I just hope it shakes up the industry a bit because we’re starting to get cobwebs over here.
by Durf
05 Jun 2008 at 14:07
Yeah, frankly I’m a fan of smaller phone sizes and I don’t like candy bars either, so the iPhone has that strike against it in my book as well.
Ken Y-N, who writes whatjapanthinks.com, commented on that story I linked above to say that he’s seen screencaps of an iPhone 10-key interface. So the Japanese thumb tribe might be happy here.
Would love to see ATOK on the thing instead of mobile Kotoeri or whatever Apple stuffs in the iPod Touch now. (How do you like that thing other than J. text input?)