iPhone 3GS Is Number One In Japan 250
mudimba writes "The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine). This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone. Nobody is sure what specific features caused the change of heart, though it is speculated that video capture and voice control might be part of the answer. When the 3G iPhone first came out it saw a spike in sales, but unlike the 3GS it was unable to outsell locally-made handsets."
We Already Knew "Hatred" Was a Lie (Score:5, Informative)
This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone.
This "hatred" was debunked [slashdot.org] shortly thereafter:
AppleInsider has posted a great article explaining that Wired's story about Japanese iPhone hate [slashdot.org] was completely false and has been edited at least twice [appleinsider.com]. The comments in the article were recycled and taken out of context, with those interviewed blogging about [blog.nobi.cc] the mistakes [daijihirata.com]. The piece then goes on to analyze the iPhone's standing in Japan, as well as some of the major factors working for and against it. At last it points out that the Wall Street Journal tried the same myth of failure [roughlydrafted.com] just after the phone's launch in Japan, recycled from a myth the year before [roughlydrafted.com], pushed by a research company with a possible anti-Apple agenda [roughlydrafted.com].
There are three points to consider (Score:5, Funny)
Firstly, the Japanese, like much of the civilised world, have a distrust of the Linux operating system. The iPhone however runs using a variant of BSD, Linux's big, more professional daddy, and hence is trusted and enjoyed by those who value honour and pride, such as the Japanese.
Secondly, it is well known that phones running Linux-based OS's still require the user to drop down to a termnial screen to modify text configuration files to change things like their phone background or ringtone. This is unacceptable.
Thirdly, Linux requires the user to have a beard and/or a weight problem. People such as this are shunned by Japanese society, and rightly so. The natural consequence of this is that users of Linux phones are also shunned.
Together these reasons make it clear why the iPhone is acheiving such a success in those faraway eastern lands. They are so far away, aren't they?
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When I was in Japan recently I noticed a pretty huge volume of Softbank commercials on TV demonstrating the new features, so it could be that. Anyway the 3GS isn't much different from the 3G so I don't think there is any one feature that has suddenly got people buying it. I think it's the almight Apple marketing machine learning from previous lessons.
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This is incorrect, you cannot subscribe to a Softbank iPhone plan without the "Packet Full" data option, which is price-capped at about 4400 yen. (Its a sliding scale with both floor/ceiling caps - you have to pay at least 1000 yen and can't get charged over 4400). In practice, every iPhone user pays the 4400 yen price unless all they do is use email.
(Note, tethering is not included in Packet Full)
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How is this a troll? The Japanese are notorious for their SMS and MMS use; even more so than Americans. Releasing a phone in Japan without these capabilities would not garner huge sales. Or is it a troll because previous IPhones DID have these features?
MMS support is (or was, at least) useless on the iPhone 3G. My wife MMSed me a photo, and I had to pick it up at a website.
SMS support is excellent, however. Very nice interface. I like it a lot.
My main problem with the iPhone is that it's too restrictive: Apple blocks useful apps from the app store, and I can only buy an iPhone together with a 2-year subscription as a network that sucks. I think I'll try that HTC Hero with Android next.
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How is this a troll?
Shut up, Flamebait!! :D
They use push email not SMS MMS (Score:4, Informative)
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With the 3GS I'm on my second iPhone, and the only improvement I could see for it (besides better battery life), is to make it water proof, or at least moderately water resistant.
Why Wasn't There A Story For Last Month's No. 1? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, although it's just as much a pro-Apple agenda that spread the news: if people don't like a product, it's much better if you can dismiss it as an irrational hatred, rather than considering the possibility that they might *gasp* actually prefer other phones.
For this news, I'd be curious to see market share. Since Apple only have one phone, and Nokia etc have loads of different products, looking at single phone sales whilst useful in some contexts, is not useful for judging who's number one (it's the multiple choice fallacy where votes get split between similar products).
There's also the obvious point that the phone has only just been released - it's misleading to claim "Number One", since this is a figure based on one month's sales, not quarterly or yearly, let alone total phones in existence.
And since the Iphone is the only phone that gets covered on Tech sites like Slashdot (god knows why), it's not surprising that they'll do fairly well. I fear we'll have a self-fulfilling prophecy where we end up with it being the most popular phone, precisely because of the coverage solely on this one phone. And then we'll end up with a monopoly platform on mobile platform that's more locked down and controlled by a single company. Nice one, Slashdot!
For all we know, those other phones may have been number one (indeed, one of them must have been), but we wouldn't have heard about it on Slashdot.
Consider - what was the Number One phone, last month in Japan, and why wasn't there a story about it? Or the Number One phone in the US, come to that? It's only news if it's unusual.
Of course I'll probably be modded down now for providing possible explanations that don't fit in with the pro-Apple viewpoint here.
Re:Why Wasn't There A Story For Last Month's No. 1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Since Apple only have one phone, and Nokia etc have loads of different products...
You didn't read the summary. It plainly states that the 16GB iphone is number 9. That would indicate 2 things
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Re:Why Wasn't There A Story For Last Month's No. 1 (Score:2)
"Consider - what was the Number One phone, last month in Japan, and why wasn't there a story about it? Or the Number One phone in the US, come to that? It's only news if it's unusual."
Two possible reasons:
1) You can't get it outside Japan so the US-centric readership of Slashdot doesn't care.
2) You said it yourself - it's only news if it's unusual. That's kind of the definition of news.
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Also, here in Japan, softbank coverage is absolutely the worst ever. No building penetration, dead spots inside of major cities, etc...
If it wasn't locked to SoftBank, I might pick one up myself, but the phone is to make calls, and if I can't do that, then the phone, by association, sucks.
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I don't know if its just me but you seem to be implying that the iPhone has become popular because of articles about it. I think there are articles about it because it is a good phone that is popular. People like to read about things they like and buy and thus its easy to get high readership on an article about a something that people love. I want an iPhone but not because of articles. I want it because in my opinion it's the best 'phone'(palm top) out there. It may not have the most features and black
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Precisely. I also just got a free ipod touch with a recent laptop purchase and to my huge surprise, I think the thing is as cool as all get out. I'm a serious computer dork and I didn't want one of these things at all because I didn't think that having one of these was worth bothering with when I can just use a regular computer just as easily. Howev
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There is an element of truth in the reasons given. For example, my Japanese friends are all very big on using their phone cameras and sending the photos to each other. The 3G has a very basic camera with no auto-focus and pretty low image quality. I have not seen output from the 3GS camera but it is supported to be a lot better.
OS updates have made improvements in Japanese text input too. The web browser, while a big step up, was never quite as revolutionary there as most phones had one and most Japanese we
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The iPhone is considered a big, bulky, slow phone in Japan. Maybe the speed of the 3GS makes it more appealing.
Actually, you're probably Daniel Eran, so it would make sense to cite yourself.
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You're really citing Daniel "make shit up as I go along and claim it's the truth" Eran as a source? The iPhone is considered a big, bulky, slow phone in Japan. Maybe the speed of the 3GS makes it more appealing. Actually, you're probably Daniel Eran, so it would make sense to cite yourself.
Strange. I just got back from Japan a week ago, and anecdotal evidence be damned, there were a ton of iPhones there. I was amazed it was selling so well.
16GB Vs 32GB Really a Deal Breaker? (Score:2)
The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine).
Is that indicative of storage being that big of a factor for phones? Or that the locally made devices compare to 16GB but not 32GB?
As a non-iPhone user, I must admit the iPhone is a touch bulky for me to use as a music device while I work out. Love my 2GB shuffle though. I guess I could see this with movies/videos on the iPhone but is there any reason I'm not getting that one would enjoy 32GB of storage? Maybe it's the stereotype that Asians take a lot more pictures than Americans? If these number
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If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).
In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He fel
Gaming (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying this accounts for all the sales, but this is Japan we're talking about.
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What's not to like?
Lack of openness?
Re:Gaming (Score:5, Informative)
What's not to like?
The lack of proper buttons, which are fairly essential for many games? Every time you want the user to press somewhere on the screen, you lose some screen estate due to the finger covering the parts at and below that point.
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Now of course none of those points are particularly original and infact I have a bottom of the range Japanese phone that can do all of those things. However the iPhone does make them convenient, does look good
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They've put Civilization on it now
I was always afraid this would happen. I wonder how many people now are going to die from deep vein thrombosis because they were playing Civ while sitting on the can for hours on end? Just... One... More... Turn... UGHH! I AM DOOMED!!!
Emoji (Score:4, Informative)
Basically every Japanese cell phone supports "emoji" emoticons, but iPhone was long without the support. This definitely was a deal breaker for some people, especially younger consumers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji [wikipedia.org]
It's officially only available for Japanese customers, but it can be unlocked: http://www.iphonesavior.com/2009/02/spell-number-app-unleashes-free-iphone-emoji.html [iphonesavior.com]
The instructions sound suspicious but I personally tested this on 2.2 firmware and it worked. I can now use emoji in text messages, tweets, or any other text field. It's also a great way to amaze your friends who have iPhones; every iPhone from 2.2 up supports viewing emoji by default.
Being Big in Japan will Spur Sales in China (Score:4, Interesting)
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... or until our two-year wireless contracts run out and there is a new shiny toy from another manufacturer to be had.
Hmmm, I'm not sure that there actually is any way for the other manufacturers to catch up, not within the next 5 years anyway. The iPhone came in at a high end price 2 years ago and, since then, Apple has steadily reduced the price and imporved the technology, just as it did with the iPod.
The iPhone's secret sauce is the app store. The iPhone is the only gadget that becomes more useful, not less, the longer you own it, because you build up a highly personalized collection of apps that you integrate i
It's because of the compass. (Score:4, Funny)
Sharp Phones? (Score:2)
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I'm kind of disappointed with the Japanese. I was expecting much cooler gadgets. I'll take my Android based MyTouch over those any day.
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So, as an ignorant American I am baffled by the rest of the list. The Sharp SH-06A is the no. 2 phone? It seems to be a fairly boring clamshell phone with a nice camera. Am I missing something?
You are indeed missing something. The Japanese cell phone market is completely different from the European or US market. The whole things is well explained in this New York Times article [nytimes.com]
Basically it's a software vs hardware thing, and it boils down to this: Unlike the rest of the world market, which is software oriented right now (and this one of the reason apple is doing so well), the Japanese cell phone market is actually much more technologically oriented.
All it takes for a phone to be "cool" in t
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market share? (Score:4, Informative)
The 32GG 3GS may be number 1, but the article doesn't mention what sort of market share it takes to claim that spot. I was just in Japan for most of this summer, and I went looking at phones with some Japanese friends. There are just SO many feature-rich phone choices out there from all of the major carriers that no single model really seemed to stand out as a market leader. If the 32GB 3GS got even a small bump in sales, that could have pushed it into first place.
As for the swipe payment option, I expected to see things like Mobile Suica [wikipedia.org] used by lots of people, but it really doesn't seem to be too common yet. Most people still seemed to pay for train and subway trips with regular Suica [wikipedia.org] (or Pasmo, Icoca, etc.) cards in their wallets. It's certainly a cool feature, but it apparently hadn't been adopted by a large part of the population yet.
Developers Developers Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have any evidence, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's the app store that made the difference. The app store is truly transformative, in many non-obvious ways.
It brings network effects to the phone. For a while it seemed everyone I knew had a RAZR, but the popularity of the phone added no value to the individual user. With the iPhone, however, the popularity of the phone brings increased developer attention, which the app store translates to improved functionality, creating a positive feedback loop. Friends will also recommend apps to each other, further creating a network effect, and reminding the non-iphone-owning friends what they're missing.
The app store brings the best form of lock-in Windows ever had - But will it run my apps? - to the phone. Suddenly no non-iPhone can be a true upgrade, since you will likely lose some of your app functionality. Common things, like interfaces for major social sites, etc., will likely be standard, but everyone will have a different set of apps they consider crucial, which will make upgrading difficult. The breadth of the app store has brought the long tail to the phone. It also allows people to be very picky. I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.
Certainly other phones will soon have access to app stores of their own, but the huge lead that Apple now has will make it very hard for someone else to catch up. They'll tout how they don't have the same approval headaches that the iPhone does, and that openness will be great. But we don't have to look far for lessons on how the popular operating system can be vastly inferior, yet still more successful than competitors.
The iPhone app store sets the iPhone up to succeed for all the reasons that Windows has. I think it's going to take a significant technology leap or other serious market disruption to stop them at this point. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, you have to respect the the way they've played this.
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In the end, that didn't work out that well for Palm. They had many thousands of apps and are now effectively history even though they had the advantage of being open as well. An app store may have helped them, but in the end I don't think that's why they're not the most popular phone platform.
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Really? Palm had an App Store? I had a Palm V, VII, and a first-gen Treo, and I never saw a centralized place to buy a wide variety of apps. There were a few, scattered sites that each sold their own product, and a few boxes (mostly office-lite, Tetris, and Bejeweled) at the big box stores, but that was all I ever ran across.
Palm may have had thousands of apps, but without a centralized distribution mechanism, an individual user only ever saw a tiny fraction of those. Where they did find them, sure, a Palm
SMAP & The Little White Dog (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly, they recently dropped the price way down on the iphones both on the ownership fees and the monthly packet plans. I'm not fully aware of the details as I got my iphone before the drop (dammit!) but if you go past a Softbank store FREE IPHONE is plastered all over the place. The free ones are the old model but the 3Gs is fairly cheap too. Softbank is known to do some fairly shady fee structures so some customers are wary of them, but hey you can't beat free as a marketing tool to get customers into the store. Also iphone was known as a luxury here and some people probably see this price drop as a chance to get one finally.
Oh and they also finally came out with a one-seg video adapter for the iphone which many Japanese want. (Digital Broadcast TV on your phone.)
So yeah, in summary, new gadget (always works in Japan) + super hot marketing campaigns + cheap prices + finally getting the iphone to keep up with the Joneses tech wise, win win for Softbank and I'm not really surprised as a casual observer of the "keitai" market that iphone 3Gs is #1 here (this month).
Sex Farm made it to #6 in Japan. (Score:2)
The data is incomplete for one big reason (Score:3, Insightful)
The company does not survey the carrier's own shops, which are major players in the Japanese cellphone market. In addition, number three, the Panasonic 830P is an almost one year old phone (last year's winter model) since superceded by two newer Panasonic phones, and the Casio W63CA is similarly an ancient (in Japanese terms) model.
Thus, to anyone who knows about the Japanese mobile phone market (such as anyone who reads my blog [whatjapanthinks.com]) the survey results are obviously biased towards bulk retailers and the people who frequent them rather than to the average Taro who frequents the carrier's own store on the High Street.
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it's small and expensive. That beats "feature-rich" any day of the week.
It certainly is feature rich. What features are missing?
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
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Swiper! No swiping! (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication [wikipedia.org]
4u
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It's still missing an infrared port for transmitting phone numbers and such too, isn't it?
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It's still missing an infrared port
Bluetooth is probably going to bury IR eventually. The only benefit that IR has over BT is it requires line of sight which can increase security. (theoretically it can be quite a bit faster also, but it rarely works out that way, and there are two conflicting standards to boot) But if there's a confirmation on both devices to initiate the connection, that's moot.
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It's still missing an infrared port for transmitting phone numbers and such too, isn't it?
Ermm.. the "bump" app exchanges contacts.. it doesn't need IR, which is a dated shitty tech compared to both wifi and bluetooth...
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yes it is. back to oldschool typing and telling ... seriously. do. not. want.
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But it does have one distinct advantage: it is now "cool" to take iPhone from your pocket, put it on a table and pretend-to-do-something with it.
I saw quite a few examples in bars and cafes.
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TV, radio, swipe payment ability, quality camera: just a few of the common features in Japanese phones.
"iheartradio" is a free app that lets you listen to just about any radio station you can imagine.
Who the hell wants local TV? You can stream any news you want from the internet.
Swipe payment is retarded, you don't need to swipe a card to make payments all you need is the credit card info. There are actually business apps which allow you to take the credit card info of someone and take payments from them.
The camera is all you've got, but if you're looking to take high quality images then you aren'
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Who the hell wants local TV? You can stream any news you want from the internet.
This is about the Japanese market, not the USA market.
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"The camera is all you've got, but if you're looking to take high quality images then you aren't really looking for a phone, you're looking for a camera. The quality lenses required for high quality photography are MUCH too large for a camera."
The vast majority of people taking pictures don't care about quality. They want convenience. The handheld at arms length self portrait taking (while drunk, in North America, frequently) populace wants camera phones. Video is even better.
I've taken maybe half a doze
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The quality lenses required for high quality photography are MUCH too large for a camera.
Which is why I use the Hubble space telescope for my photography needs.
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TV, radio, swipe payment ability, quality camera: just a few of the common features in Japanese phones.
Thank you for the clarification. It should be noted the sort of features that make a phone 'complete' vary from place to place.
Part of the issue with the iPhone is that it is designed in North America. What I mean by this is that user surveys probably focus more on the immediate geography than stuff happening elsewhere. As to radio and TV, Apple has already hinted in the ways it approaches things that it s
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Adding to the parent's list: infrared port (for wirelessly swapping contact data - the Japanese did it years before "bumping" and it came pre-installed), barcode scanner, QR code support (although this can be supplemented with an app).
Quality camera (Score:2)
3GS alleviates this. Its camera is pretty darn good in good light. Very sharp, focusing is intuitive, and it can focus fairly close, too (for barcodes).
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um, Felcia needs an RFI chip inside, does it have one? Not that I know ...
but there is a oneSeg attachment for the iphone in Japan.
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The iPhone 3GS, the current phone from Apple, lacks TV, Swipe payment, cannot act as a visa/mastercard/AE etc, a decent camera, HD video recording or HD video playing, Television (analogue or digital) reception, radio (analogue, digital or satellite), VPN, WiFi sharing, trackpad emulation, a full keyboard, facial recognition and full voice control - all of which have been in all japanese phones since at least 2007.
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Thanks for the info - I had no idea that phones could do some of these things.
See, these are the sorts of things it would be good to hear about on tech sites. Instead, I'll probably hear about them in five years' time when it gets added to the Iphone...
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Slashdot isn't a tech site, it's just a cleverly disguised Web 2.0 marketing agency.
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well there good for:
watching TV
listening to radio
paying with your phone
recording videos/taking photos of a high quality
VPN, wifi-hotspot creating,...etc
Seriously not everybody needs everything to be dumbed down for them, some people can use menus, additionally the full voice control can work around the "horrible interface".
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To be honest, I love the japanese interface way over the iPhone one. I need to swipe and tap around. with a japanese interface all menus have shortcuts for the number keys. I am so fast to reply, write a mail, or do anything compared to when I try to do it on an iPhone.
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To be honest, I love the japanese interface way over the iPhone one. I need to swipe and tap around. with a japanese interface all menus have shortcuts for the number keys. I am so fast to reply, write a mail, or do anything compared to when I try to do it on an iPhone.
Could you point us to an example?
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No most of those don't really help since most are well out-of-date with current iPhone OS and hardware. ...as of iPhone OS 3.0 and the 3GS going off the first article you find in your suggested search:
1. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) - SUPPORTED
2. Stereo Bluetooth / A2DP support - SUPPORTED
3. Selecting, copying, and pasting text - SUPPORTED
4. Horizontal keyboard for e-mail and notes - SUPPORTED
5. Improved predictive text (or the ability to turn it off) - UNSURE of improvements
6. Integrated IM applicati
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almost every feature is in there
Apple even went as far as licensing the ability to restore the OS on the iPhone as the magic fix for problems. It works so well in Windows, Apple decided to do it on the iPhone. I had to do it yesterday and the Apple support forums are full of people giving this magic fix advice.
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:5, Insightful)
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated
Japan is the leading market for luxury brands [jetro.org], like Gucci, Louis Vitton, Hermes etc. Brand motivation and recognition are sky high.
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:5, Funny)
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(about luxury products)Maybe because those brands produce quality products?
So do others. In this segment, quality is just a part of the overall package you are buying. If you compare a Timex and a Patek Philippe, they probably show the time equally well.
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:4, Funny)
No they don't... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, a cheap quartz Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe, or any other mechanical watch. People don't buy mechanical watches for accuracy.
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The Japanese can afford that shit. Anyone who can't was already voted off the island. They've got a saying over there, get busy living or get busy dying. Those who don't agree are dead or moved to Brazil (no, really.) They have no space for large showy shit, so they have small showy shit like nine trillion dollar handbags.
Also, that kind of boutique stuff is often very high quality as others have said. You can tell the difference between the real stuff and the fakes because the fakes aren't top quality. If
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:2)
Sure, it may be the same old Corolla on the outside, but on the inside it's running a VTEC
Bad analogy [google.com] just kicked in yo.
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So the reports that the iPhone was selling terribly.. Yeah, that was true.
Actually, no, it wasn't. [slashdot.org] The first post in this thread clearly shows that myth has been debunked. By several sources.
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If it's not true, then why on earth is this newsworthy in the first place? (Lots of phones are number 1 in some particular country - after all, you obviously have one "number 1" per month, per country, which is a lot).
The only possible valid reason I can think this could be news is if the Iphone was selling badly, thus it's midly newsworthy that a bad selling niche phone gets number one (albeit in one country, for one month, on the month it was released in that country).
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iPods sold badly.
Uh, you might have a case with the original iPhone but you certainly do not have a case with iPods. They surpassed Sony's MP3 player in 2005 [mobilemag.com] and there's no shortage of information saying they're very popular in Japan.
Get over it. Jeez, it's like a religion with you guys.
You have to own all models of the iPhone in order to be eligible to be completely clear so that your OT (operating telephone) levels are uninhibited. Are you a suppressive person? Oh no, I've been in contact with you! Great Woz! Now Jobs won't let me get to the last OT level no matter how
I Have to Disagree on a Few Things (Score:4, Insightful)
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever.
That's wrong. If you had spoken to a British or American consumer at the time of Japanese automotive boom, you would have found that they are just as quality motivated as the American consumer. And had you spoken to American or British or Italian automotive makers, you would have found some of them wanted quality but were just slightly misinformed as to how they should attain it.
As someone who's taken a course on this, we got the Japanese invention known as The House of Quality [harvardbusiness.org] pounded into our heads. It's basically a far superior way [wikipedia.org] to "define relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities." The Japanese invented this, I don't know the exact origins (wish I did) but instead of it ended up as some weird business process patent it ended up being used by everyone over there. As a result, their cars didn't leak oil (like the British motorcycles) and they didn't slowly reject every screw that was holding them together. I'm sure the Japanese had many more tools at analyzing the engineering aspects of cars but the fact of the matter is that their engineering and quality control practices just exceeded anything anyone else had (if anyone else had quality control at the time).
Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
This seriously got moderated up? Have you ever been to Tokyo? Have you seen how flashy that city is? Have you ever seen Japanimation, Japanese commercials or game shows? Flashy is all I can think of to describe that.
Your cultural stereotypes humor me. But I think you're suffering from some serious misinformation and anecdotes to which I could provide counter-anecdotes all day long. But both stances are merely an exercise in futility.
They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it.
Well, if they laid hands on it, they've already purchased it and that's a win for Apple. Or are you saying that the (virtually) same reviews each culture read influenced them differently? The Japanese have more options than we do and they had things that were better than the original iPhones. Those weren't really marketed in America. The iPhone wasn't crap compared to what 90% of Americans were already using. That's the important point, not that American consumers are any stupider or smarter than Japanese consumers.
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That's wrong. If you had spoken to a British or American consumer at the time of Japanese automotive boom, you would have found that they are just as quality motivated as the American consumer. And had you spoken to American or British or Italian automotive makers, you would have found some of them wanted quality but were just slightly misinformed as to how they should attain it.
That is more than a little revisionist. I don't know what happens if you talk to Brits about car purchases, I don't have the background. But the American consumer might have claimed to be concerned about quality, but their purchasing history tells the truth: they were interested in style and power. The recession of today has changed that for many Americans, or perhaps caused them to somewhat reassess priorities; Car companies worldwide are however still focusing on making more powerful vehicles with mileage
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The Japanese are among the biggest label whores on the planet (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). "The Japanese aren't brand-motivated" is one of the funniest things I've ever read on slashdot. I used to live in a well known ski resort town and watching the Japanese tourists descend on the luxury label stores like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path was a sight to behold.
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That's pretty much why I waited for the 32GB 3G[S] before I got an iPhone. The old ones sucked and had lousy storage space. I could get a free phone (used to have a Vu, which my mom inherited) that did just about what they did with a 4GB add in memory card. 32GB and video mail is hard to beat tho :-p. That and the dual core gpu did it for me. The gaming is ridonculous for a portable device.
It's really a mini mac with a phone radio added, rather than simply a phone. It's a bad ass device.
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:2)
I know it's a troll, but man, that made me laugh.
A fetishist is not a connoisseur.
Re:Technology progresses. Japanese are tech expert (Score:2)
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated.
Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. Have you ever been to the DFS Galleria in the Waikiki area of Honolulu? It is a duty free mall which caters mainly towards Japanese tourists. I took a look around and was handed a bunch of flyers for NTT Docomo and other Japanese companies (in Japanese of course). They sell all of the high end luxury brands there at inflated prices. I could get the watches they sell there for half the price or even less in stores on the mainland. They sell them at those prices because th
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There are no tentacle porn apps, so I really don't get the interest.
Are you kidding? If you jailbreak it you can have all of the transgendered multiendowed lolirape tentacle furry apps you can imagine... and some you can't imagine.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of jailbroken transgendered multiendowed lolirape tentacle furry loaded iPhone 3GS...
They can all communicate with each other over WiFi, and make a large screen when all placed in a rectangle.
THAT, my friends, is advancement!
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The OP may have been phrased in a flamebait-manner, but it raises a point - why is this news? At first it sounds newsworthy, but the story is "X phone is number one selling phone this month in this country".
But there's always a number one phone!
So are we going to see a Slashdot story per month, per country, on what the number one phone is?
I note that Sharp occupy 4 positions on that list - it would be curious to know how their sales compare overall. Especially how they compared one month ago, or how they'll
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Because Sharp phones only sell in Japan. Like Panasonic, or Mitsubishi, or NEC. Of course there will be no story here. Who cares outside of Japan about phones that only work in Japan. Nobody. iPhone gets huge press because it is the current hyper cool thing to have in US & perhaps Europe too.
I really don't know about Japan though. My guess is that Softbank has a very very cheap plan for the iPhone, plus you get it super cheap with some 1 or 2 year contract.
But just from my short views is that quite a lo
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This is already a reality: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/01/gun-mount-and-s/ [wired.com]