
IPhone not selling well in Japan, now available for free - vaksel
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/26/iphone-not-selling-well-in-japan-now-available-for-free/
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anatoli
Bleh. I guess you can't expect too much from a publication associated with
TechCruch.

As I said over there:

1) There's no stats, so how can they claim it's not selling well.

2) There are many iPhone apps developed by the Japanese, that would suggest
that the phone is selling at least moderately well. (IMO)

With that said, the iPhone is not as special for the Japanese, as their phones
have been very advanced for a long time — although perhaps not to the level of
usability that iPhone reached.

~~~
igorgue
you don't need stats for this, why are they giving it away for free then?
meanwhile here in the US some people bought the 1st iPhone version at a very
high price!, is jp a smarter market? maybe!

I'll have to agree Japanese market phones are a lot more advanced than US.

~~~
Retric
Getting people to upgrade to a cellphone that surfs the web is a significant
revenue stream. In the US Apples profit per iPhone is more than it's direct
cost to consumers so IMO making it "free" is not that big of a deal. Toss in
AT&T's profit and the numbers get insane.

~~~
sahaj
the other thing to keep in mind is that apple makes 30% of every app sold.
they can afford to sell the phone for less price up front, if they know they
can make that money back by selling apps.

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delackner
The iPhone in Japan remains one of the worst phone experiences available on
the Japanese market, on just very basic important features.

"push email" is not a concept here, because at least with Docomo and AU, all
email already arrives on average within a minute. The iPhone (and Softbank
generally) taking 15 minutes and manual checking is a joke.

Signal strength is laughable. Softbank has the worst signal strength of the
three major carriers, and then compared to other Softbank handsets the iPhone
even gets worse reception still.

Emoji support, even having been added, is not working correctly, as the moji
don't look anything like the ones that other handsets use, so you have no idea
what the person originally sent you.

Email is not searchable, yet most japanese people use their keitai as their
primary email reading device.

These issues may all be entirely Softbank's fault, and nothing to do with the
device, but there is no non-Softbank iPhone.

