iPhone in Japan.. Finally!
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 8:33AM 
Well it looks like the iPhone will finally be making its way to Japan. Now that fact that this has taken so long is not a big surprise for me since the GSM/GPRS/EDGE current model will not run on any network in Japan so that certainly held things up. Now that the 3G iPhone's release is a few days away it seems only natural to see the iPhone announced in Japan. This is afterall a giant market for cell phone cells.
It is a surprise that SoftBank is the provider that will be getting this phone. Most would have thought that a more high profile provider would have landed this phone. Someone like NTT DoCoMo or Au would have been a less surprising choice. For me SoftBank makes sense a bit since they use the UMTS 3G network that most assume that the new 3G phone will be using. Maybe we will see the new 3G phone have all the 3G frequencies and allow ATT users from the US to use their phones in Japan (that would be cool).
On a side note I think the phone will sell well but Japanes users will be giving up quite a bit to use this phone. It will be interesting to see if the status of having an iPhone will make some people change their phone expectations to be able to fall in love with the phone
For me I am hoping that this means the Japanese text entry that the iPod Touch has had for a while will finally make its way to the iPhone so my wife will be happy.
Well a few days and we will all know what iPhone 2 will look like and what specs have been changed. Also the app store should be going live monday if some of the developers can be beleived. Let's keep our fingers crossed (though I have since retired my iphone).
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