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Yesterday Softbank Mobile announced that they will start iPhone service in Japan this year. With 18 million customers, Softbank is the third largest carrier in the country after Docomo and KDDI. The Japanese iPhone will be the 3G (WCMDA) version. A lot of people speculated that Docomo would be the carrier for iPhone, but Docomo simply thought Apple was asking for too much in the revenue share agreement. Apple has been playing Docomo and Softbank off each other for months. I wonder if iPhone will be Osaifu-keitai payment enabled (touch and go payment) like most other Japanese cell phones.

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Comment by Alex on June 5, 2008 at 1:27am
Hey, iPhones on 3g are coming to more european countries. I really think the world outside the US are a little more discriminating when it comes to their cell phone technology. The technology seems to be accepted slower here. I had the iPhone for two weeks, and it was a very limiting piece of technology. Granted Jobs does two things well 1. user interface and 2. marketing is very good, but the phone itself is missing a whole range of very BASIC features and technologies.

In addition, the amount sold phones relative to the amount of press that gadget gets is ridiculous. I think the US press really think this is the last great US technology firm....especially after Motorola is heading for a fall....(pity they don;t see all the great smaller things going on in the US) In addition I find the crippleware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware in the iPhone to be abusing customers...it just pissed me off too much.

I got Nokia N95..It does not have touch screen and it has only a 8GB card in it, but otherwise it surpass the iPhone in EVERY respect. Simply no comparison...and I got mine for iPhone price without a two year contract...the GPS features is really enabling so many nice features.

So the new US iPhone from Apple will be announced in a very few days now, and this is a phone you can compare it to....http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n96-2253.php

The kicker is really some of the applications...checkout the Nokia http://www.nokia.com/betalabs it is incredible that Nokia does not yet understand that they are sitting on a gold mine in the sportstracker program...just calling it sportstracker is loosing out on what that application should be doing....ahh well. http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/main/index.do

There is such an open market for developing applications for the cellphone market. Especially in the US because large companies are afraid to do the development themselves...they will rather wait until they see something that works and either copy it or buy the companies...

Okay enough of me ranting..need to get back to work.. :-)
Comment by Mika Leuck on June 5, 2008 at 12:50am
Hi Scott. Thank you for the link. Its too bad iPhone will be missing those features :-( It will be interesting to see what happens.
Comment by Scott Murphy on June 5, 2008 at 12:01am
Oh, I forgot to mention, the iphone won't have osaifu-keitai feature. According to this article, its missing out a whole lot of other features too.
Comment by Scott Murphy on June 4, 2008 at 11:51pm
I'm really interested to see if the iPhone will be a big hit in Japan. As far as I have read up, the iPhone hasn't done a good job at incorporating some of what makes up the Japanese cellphone culture such as 1seg and mobile games (モバゲー). Nonetheless, I'm really excited to see it localized.

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