Home
Webmail
Sakura
Flickr
About meArchives for the 'tech' Category
MacBookery
At home now. Waiting for some stew to finish cooking, and for Sakura to decide that enough is enough for this day and go to sleep so we can actually eat some of it. This is the perfect time to play with the camera on the new computer, right? Right!
Free loot from the company
Seen in Cringely’s latest piece:
“The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company’s decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems.”
That just sounds cool for some reason. I do get the same sort of treatment from my company, but since we do publishing all this means is that I get copies of all our magazines and books and so on. And since I already read everything in them during the translation and editing stages, that somehow isn’t as exciting as a slick new phone.
Maybe I should go work for Nissan. Ask for an Infiniti or something.
The Apple *yawn* phone
The Los Angeles Times has a pretty good article on the iPhone’s reception in Japan, which to date has been almost no response at all: “In Japan, barely a ripple.” There are a number of reasons why this product announcement just isn’t important in this market, and the article touches on a few of them: phones here already come packed with space-age features, the networks here are already faster than anything the iPhone will run on.
I like the look of the interface on Apple’s new toy. Very slick. Tight integration with the Macs in my life would be nice to have, too. Beyond that, though, this thing does nothing for me . . . I don’t need a PDA, it’s too large to use comfortably as a cellphone, its capacity is anemic compared to the 60GB iPod I already wander around with, I have a better camera. Oh yeah, and it’s a GSM phone that won’t work at all in this country.
Softbank’s Son Masayoshi is off in America now, attending MacWorld (maybe the CES show too?), which leads to rumors that maybe someday his company will be the one to bring the Apple phone to Japan’s market. Who knows? Maybe a few years down the road there’ll be a third-gen iPhone in my pocket that can actually deal with the 4G networks in operation in Japan by then.
That gives me a few years to work on meeting more people I might want to call. Bonus!
PS3 auctions followup
Saw a post on the Ars Technica forums from a person who dug up the 2channel thread where people are organizing their assaults on the PS3 auctions. Peek at it here if you’ve got the Japanese skills. You can also click here to see the highest-priced bids in the system right now. Looks like a deal to me!
PS3 units all going straight to Yahoo Auctions
This is an interesting read. The PS3 launch happened yesterday morning, and it was all over the news . . . Crowds of people lining up for hours in the predawn dawk of Yurakucho to get the goods from Bic Camera. Excited gamers who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest—to take it home and start playing all weekend long.
Or not. The mail in that link describes a different situation—a bunch of Chinese people who were paid maybe ¥20,000 each to stand in line and get one unit each, which they then carried around the corner to give to some Japanese guy.
“Thank you for your patience!,” welcomed the cashier to the first PS3 buyers. “What game software would you like with your purchase?”
“Hai,” the consumer nodded, not understanding the question.
Most cashiers soon figured out that the men and women standing in front of them didn’t speak Japanese. Some would then repeat the same question in English, and would all get the say reply, “Only hardware.”
Based on my observations of the first twenty PS3s sold at Bic Camera, they were all purchased by Chinese nationals, none of whom bought any software. After making their purchase, television crews asked for interviews but all were declined. These temporary owners of PS3s would then make their way down the street where their bosses waited. After several minutes, a dozen PS3s were rounded up, as their Japanese business manager paid out cash to those who waited in line for them. I witnessed a homeless-looking Chinese man, in his sixties or seventies get paid 20,000 yen for his services and was then sent away.
These things will probably all end up on Yahoo Auctions. (Ebay doesn’t exist over here, so these are the big ones.) Most of the PS3 units for sale there now are listed at around ¥80,000 and up . . . but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number go lots higher.
I doubt very much the numbers will go as high as they are in this auction, which seems to have been hijacked by some people who want to mess up these auctions by making absurd bids (and then failing to do a thing after winning, no doubt). ¥1.4 million is the high bid as of this post. Hah.
Sony needed to have a lot more of these ready for launch. The Nintendo DS Lite is still impossible to find on shelves, so all you can see is oceans of software for the things . . . I predict similar sights in the Sony PS3 sections of game stores for months to come. Plenty of cool-looking games that nobody can play. Unless they hire a Chinese guy to stand in line and get them a machine, I guess.
Heh . . . One of the units has been bid up to a billion yen. Yeah, these guys are serious all right.
-
Flickr photos
www.flickr.com 
More of Durf's photos