In Japan, the iPhone will always have the shutter sound even with mute on. You can't disable it or mute it. Even if you didn't buy the phone in Japan, the iPhone will do that in Japan.
Um, no. I just found out about the issue as I bought a Japanese iPhone5S in January and promptly returned it the next day because I couldn't turn off the camera sound. I picked up a USA iPhone5S in Hawaii in February. Have been back in Japan for 2 months now. No sounds coming out of my camera on my USA iPhone5S.
The thing that makes this most ridiculous is (a) they don't have the same requirement of digital cameras in Japan and (b) 3rd party camera apps you download for phones are not required to make a sound. Pretty much every Japanese person downloads another camera app for exactly that reason.
Me personally, I just don't want the sound. Sitting in a quiet restaurant taking stupid pictures of my food with my phone is already embarrassing enough without calling myself out with my phone making noise. Hence getting the USA model. Sure I could have used separate camera software but I wanted to be able to use the camera app that doesn't require me to unlock the phone without sound.
> The thing that makes this most ridiculous is (a) they don't have the same requirement of digital cameras in Japan and (b) 3rd party camera apps you download for phones are not required to make a sound. Pretty much every Japanese person downloads another camera app for exactly that reason.
iPhone's bought in a lot of countries in the Middle East are equally ridiculous as they disable FaceTime (i.e. there is no FaceTime app). Even if you leave the Middle East, e.g. go to the UK and put a UK SIM in, FaceTime is still disabled. Same if you reformat even after doing that, so it's locked at the hardware level. Taking another iPhone to the Middle East works fine (although in most places it still won't actually work as the countries have internet level filtering in place).
The funny thing is you can still download Skype from the App Store and use that without restrictions :)
Middle East countries treat phone and internet as a source of revenue rather than as fundamental business- entrepreneur-enabling infrastructure.
So they're concerned that Facetime, maybe particularly Facetime audio, cannibalizes their mobile network call revenue. Yes, Skype and other alternatives may still be available, but Facetime is integrated into the iOS address book and pressing the "call with facetime" button is just as convenient as dialing a contact's phone number.
I saw this crushingly-self-harmful behavior when I lived in the region and experienced expensive, slow Internet access. They also ban ISPs from buying bandwidth from anyone other than a massively-overpriced state monopoly pipe. If they treated mobile and internet as a key enabling infrastructure instead, the massive expansion in business would result in much higher tax revenue than the hit to the measly communications tolls. But they're either short-termist or have friends who personally profit from the telecom departments.
Plain and simple: State capitalism runs the risk of cronyism, corruption, regulatory capture, etc. Singapore is a good example of state capitalism with relatively low levels of all of these.
Film cameras: SLRs are big and obvious, Leicas not so much but still fairly obvious. The Rolleiflex medium format dual lens reflex camera has a leaf shutter and is very quiet at the time of exposure and is held at waist height. Popular with portrait photographers. However a Rollei is not easily concealed. Taking any of these cameras out is a serious undertaking. Bag, film, camera, various extras. Not casual.
I suppose the advent of high quality cameras that are always carried as part of a phone coupled with the very small size of the phone has lead some countries to evolve these regulations.
Perhaps an actual digital camera is felt to fall in the 'not casual' category, so not covered by the regulation?
I'm not sure what casual has to do with it.
People that want to take up skirt shots aren't casual and they can buy keychain video cameras for $4 a piece on eBay and stick them in their shoes
The laws in Japan that require sounds for the phone are as stupid as punishing legit software purchasers with anti-copying measures. They only hurt the legit people and don't at all hinder the undesirable behavior
Now the question is - how would the iPhone even know that's in Japan? :) GPS? I think OS X uses the time zone for these things, e.g. to block certain WiFi channels due to legal requirements.
Well, it is a phone... It's going to have access to geo data from the local cell phone towers, no timezone hacks necessary. In fact I believe the iPhone adjusts your active timezone automatically according to the geo data collected from the local cell tower, hence why your phone time changes when you touch down after a long flight.
Actually the time update is not based on inference from location data, but rather it is actively transmitted by the cell network as part of the GSM standard.
Though it's possibly worth pointing out that time/date is not a _requirement_ to the standard and not all networks implement it. It's possibly also worth pointing out that most recent Android devices seem to use NTP at the OS level rather than relying on GSM broadcast info.
As the other poster said, time has it's own standard. In terms of your reply to OP, it's even simpler. The network identifier for an operator broadcast by the cell tower consists of a network code and a country code :)
Maybe it is also transmitted that way, but changing the time zone from Australia from New Guinea has repeatedly fixed my OS X WiFi issues when a Chinese roommate used an illegal channel (in Australia).
It will be connected to a telco network, right? That's how it knows in what country it is. In Europe it is quite common to cross countries borders and as soon as you get connected to your neighbours telco you get a text welcoming you to the country.
Are you sure? I thought regulation-specific stuff like this was baked into the firmware via flags that checked the hardware model number.
For example: my iPhone 5, which I bought in China, cannot make or receive voice-only FaceTime calls. Even if I am in the US, using a US SIM, this is the case. It's not related to the GPS or cell tower location, or to the time zone.
