Posted on Sep 15th, 2008 by Philip King in iPhones Talk | 2 Comments

2 Comments to “Japan sales of iPhone slow, reports say”

1. on 21 Sep 2008 at 6:18 pm1acton

   I think there are some features that the Japanese need to have and use models that they are already using that is not provided by iPhone - e.g. peer-to-peer sharing via infrared, electronic wallet, camcorder (and then sharing the movies offline, not needing to connect to youtube equivalent),etc
   Check out this report: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9906102?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
   The west is just too internet centric, there is life also outside the net.

   And check this out too: http://acton-acton.blogspot.com/

2. on 22 Sep 2008 at 2:06 am2unhappyconsumer

   Although the iphone is missing a long list of standard functionality other phones here in Japan have, the main reason why it doesn’t/won’t sell well in Japan is the fact that the email is unworkable.
   - inbox can’t be set to display user names
   - emoji (pictures ALL young people use in their emails) cannot be entered or displayed
   - can’t send pictures directly from the iphone to other phones (no way of resizing the image)
   - because the mail is IMAP based, mail cannot go to users of other carriers (docomo) without EACH EMAIL ADDRESS being added to a white list (mail from pc’s blocked to avoid spam). I haven’t personally checked, but friends say domains cannot be added to the white list
   - etc.
   As apple doesn’t seem like it will accept 3rd party email programs, this problem seems unlikely to be fixed for a long time or ever. This makes many consumers, like myself, wishing they weren’t stuck in a 2 year contract, spreading the bad news to other Japanese potential buyers.

What's your opinion?