Turns out those of us who expressed skepticism about the iPhone's success in Japan were wrong — it's huge here. It's conquered nearly half of Japan's smart phone market, according to this Fast Company article. Someone told me last night that it was 7 out of 10 now. Either way, a combination of great marketing, difficult-to-use Japanese cell phones, and other factors have made the iPhone a big hit, and not just among geeks anymore. Case in point: My brother has one, my dad just got one, and my mom is getting one.
I'm not sure how big of a hit it is... The "smartphone" market in Japan represents only around something like 3% of the total smartphone market, so 46.1% of 3% is hardly what I call "being huge"
Posted by: Archie4oz | December 29, 2009 at 05:37 PM
I have to agree with Archie402. The Japanese smartphone market is not big (though not sure it's only 3%).
Plus, migrating to SoftBank only to get a iPhone doesn't sound smart to me.
Ps. My brother has one and I had some trouble to type. Still prefer a smartphone with physical qwerty keyboard.
Posted by: Saint Isaac | December 29, 2009 at 10:30 PM
I dunno, SoftBank works well for me, and for a lot of people I know, it certainly doesn't give the iPhone the bad rub that ATT are doing stateside...
Also Japanese phones are a mess for people who aren't used to them. But then pretty much everyone is and switching to something else means learning something new, people don't like being made to learn new things.
But the iPhone isn't just a smartphone competitor, at the moment its priced to be a competitor to even lower end handsets and it can easily outperform.
Perhaps it's thorn in the flesh is lack of one-seg without an extra brick to carry around.
Posted by: John Orme | December 30, 2009 at 02:32 AM
I've used Softbank around Japan and never had any trouble. I just rent their SIM card for a couple of months each visit. Service has been great no matter what phone I used.
The girlfriend finally switched and she loves it. What's nice with the 3GS, is that when she sends me a picture, I can open it up in Preview, on my Mac and use the locate button to view that location in Google Maps.
As for 1SEG, it's not bad if you're not moving, still I don't recall seeing to many people ever watching 1SEG on their phone. I use the adapter on my PSP for that.
I was about the last holdout of my friends, as I stuck with WinMo on my HTC devices. In fact, it wasn't until the 3GS that the iPhone caught up enough with my HTC phone for me to switch.
Still, this uptick in iPhone owners in Japan is exactly what I figured long ago. (Long ago in Internet years)
Posted by: vagrant | December 30, 2009 at 09:32 AM