iPhone selling far less than expected in Japan

You know, I called this a year ago. I said that the iPhone would initially get a solid reception in Japan due to its consumer appeal, but would quickly die down as the feature-for-feature comparisons to high-end Japanese phones became more apparent (1seg, QR Code, keitai-osaifu, FeliCa, etc).

Of course naysayers dismissed me, claiming the software experience of the iPhone itself would eclipse any lack of hardware features that “Japanese don’t use anyway” (supposedly).

Now, the iPhone isn’t a bad device, but in reality neither are other smartphones. Windows Mobile will soon have presence on all four carriers (NTT, Softbank, KDDI, eMobile), and with eMobile offering some appetizing all-you-can-eat data plans and KDDI looking to launch 20mbps WiMAX service soon (which blows away the iPhone’s 7.2mbps link), there’s not too much going for Apple. Especially considering that Apple probably will not launch a subsequent iPhone for another 10 months.

In my opinion, the reason of the low score of iPhone sales in Japan was neither of what everybody discussed.

The main reason was poor Japanese input program.

Prior to iPhone 2.1, Japanese input method was horrible. But, they’ve fixed this problem at 2.1 firmware. So one very major problems of iPhone has been fixed last week. So the problem was partially fixed.

In fact, iPhone just came back to be the top selling phones among Softbank at the first week of Sep.

Also, Softbank hasn’t really marketed corporate accounts yet.

Softbank just launched the new marketing campaigned to try iPhone for 3 months completely free.

And, one of the key factor of iPhone is how much Japanese programmer will join to develop applications.

Since Japanese people] have our own culture among mobile phones.

They definitely needs different kind of applications.

Like…. MySpace didn’t do well, but Mixi did among SNS. Yahoo! Japan is very successful, but Google failed.

I think this will be the key.

I have to say that I find it a hell of a lot easier to type in English on my iPhone than typing on a regular Japanese cell phone.

It was driving me nuts pushing the #2 button not once, twice, but three times just to get the letter “c” and then needing to push yet another button just to make that into a capital “C” in order to start a sentence correctly.

On my iPhone, I only need to push one button and the phone will automatically write it as a capital letter if I am starting a sentence with it. It also remembers names I have written previously and will automatically start them with capital letters as well. It is just great!

not exactly similar, but this reminds me of how facebook tanked in Japan. Do they not have decent market analysts? I’m seriously confused.

Properly preparing the iPhone for the Japanese market would have required a pretty big overhaul — adding in keitai site browsers, E-money chips, a TV tuner, proper emoji support, infrared, and so on and so forth — which isn’t really a viable option. I think Apple knew that the iPhone was basically going to have a cult following and that it couldn’t impact the really entrenched markets here. I personally think it’s the most amazing piece of consumer technology out there, but it lacks a lot of the frills (and all of the cuteness) that Japanese cell phones have. Nothing you can do, really.

Plus it’s pretty expensive. 10,000 yen a month for two years, baseline cost — you could easily end up paying 3,000 USD just for the iPhone in that span of time. That strikes me as a bit on the steep side of things.