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).
Service 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 . . .
by Tenorikuma
23 Jun 2008 at 22:14
Since you seem more knowledgeable than me, I hope I can ask you a question or two.
1. What do you mean by SMS not existing? I use it all the time on my Softbank phone.
2. Depending on the answer to (1), do you think we will have to do all our messaging using Mail.app instead of the SMS app?
3. Any idea if emoji will work?
by Durf
23 Jun 2008 at 22:38
Hi Tenorikuma,
1. I have no doubt that SMS exists, actually, it’s just that in my experience so few people use it that it might as well not. The fact that every phone in this country comes with an email address that can be used to contact all other addresses–not just those tied to phones, like SMS–has made that whole system pretty much dead to the Japanese mobile communicating public, I think.
2. I haven’t seen a real live iPhone in its present incarnation so I’m not sure about this one. The SoftBank S! plans come with an address that I believe you access directly through the phone’s software, not by firing up a Yahoo webmail interface, so that might be a part of the deal here. (It might be what you access through the Mail.app included in the iPhone OS X too, though.) If I do end up with one of these things I’ll be using webmail for my gol.com and work and gmail.com accounts, I imagine, rather than hooking them all into the onboard app.
3. This is something I haven’t heard a bit about . . . Working those extra icons into the mix isn’t particularly challenging from a technical standpoint (there are Unicode and S-JIS codes for the things that you can see on NTT’s site for example) but it remains to be seen whether Apple stuck the functionality into the OS on the iPhone.
Thanks for stopping by!
by adamrice
23 Jun 2008 at 22:55
Some of those emoji actually do exist in Unicode (interestingly, if you take a look at the Character Palette/Symbols/Miscellaneous Symbols, you’ll see that 晴 is given as a related character for ☀ and so on). Some of them do not. I have little doubt somebody is going to work out a mapping between DoCoMo’s 外字 and Unicode equivalents