That said, the Japanese ARE really resistant to Apple.

I know, you almost never see any one on the train with an iPod as they’re all sticking with the safe option of a Sony or a Panasonic, or if they do go American, they get the Zune.

The LAT interviews could have been chosen more wisely, but the basic point holds, I think. As the iPhone stands today it would not sell well in Japan. It’s too big to use as a phone, too small (capacity-wise) to use as an iPod. I think most Japanese consumers who keep track of such developments overseas would look at this thing as a PDA, and the market for those things is just plain small.

On the plus side, it’s Apple kit, so it’s stylish and nicely put together, which are always good things for Japanese consumers. And since it runs on some flavor of OSX it should be multilingual from the get-go, or else very easy to localize (just include the appropriate .lproj files in the software you build for it). In late 2008, when there’s an iPhone Nano out that works with whatever 3.5G networks are up and running in Japan, the thing will come over here and sell like the Nintendo DS, probably. But not this thing. Not now.

That said, the Japanese ARE really resistant to Apple. They’re stuck in the mental mind block that Americans were about 5 years ago: “My work uses PCs, and I know how to work with them”

Also, Softbank is probably the best guess at the moment. More reasoning going something like this: Apple has ties with Yahoo. Yahoo has ties with Softbank.

And a lot of Japanese people I know oohed and aahed when they saw it. they hear the same ‘reinvent’ blah blah talk from all CEOs, so that was nothing new.

http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/readers/odaibeya/32688.html

The results should be posted on the 19th or so.

Of course surveys like this are sometimes taken too literally; is there anyone out there who doesn’t want an iPhone? I want one. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one.

So I’d guess SoftBank will pick it up. If I remember correctly they have a number of other handsets from foreign makers, like Nokia, HTC, and Samsung, so it seems to fit with their lineup.

2MP camera seems a bit weak for the Japanese market, especially since we don’t know how good it really is.

And finally, as big of a Mac fan as I am, and I do love the iPhone UI, the user experience just isn’t that much of a jump over say a Symbian handset using the UIQ UI, and Opera…