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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).
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 . . .
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.
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.
New old movies
If you live in Japan, you get to watch American movies three months later than everyone else, and for more money to boot. Well, in the theater, anyway; if you’re renting disks it’s quite affordable but you get to wait six months instead. I’ve never gotten into the whole “download movies from the internets” thing, but I suppose that route is there for people who can’t wait to watch in a bit more comfort than a computer chair offers.
A few coming up that I’m interested in seeing are There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy (thanks to James for cluing me in to him many years ago). I must admit this is my least favorite of his books—with the possible exception of The Sunset Limited (Amazon page), but I haven’t gotten to that one yet, so no ranking there. But I’m interested to see what happens when this makes it to the screen in the hands of the actors and directors involved with this project.
(I never saw the 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, but I’ve never seen reviews of it that made me feel like I was missing out. Would be nice to see someone in Hollywood approach the entire Border Trilogy in a serious fashion.)
McCarthy’s page at IMDB says that not only The Road but Blood Meridian and Outer Dark are also in production now. I wonder about the possibility of doing a good transition to the screen with those two—particularly Blood Meridian, which features massive violence and supernaturally intelligent bald giants and such. However, Ridley Scott is listed as the director for it, so maybe there’s a chance we’ll see a compelling Judge Holden on our movie screens. For me, on my TV six months later.
Good information on Cormac McCarthy is available at this site.
An old temple photo
Taken at Jindaiji in the late nineteenth century. Not. Actually it was taken at Jindaiji a few years ago (the original is here) and run through this cool online “old photo generator” called the 幕末古写真ジェネレーター (Bakumatsu old photo generator). Perfect for making your shots of Kabukicho neon last weekend look like they belong in an Isabella Bird book.
(Hat tip to Asiajin for this one.)
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