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How Steve Jobs Got the iPhone Into Japan

Posted by samzenpus on from the back-in-the-day dept.

hcs_$reboot writes "Masatoshi Son, SoftBank CEO, remembers the early days when he tried to cut a deal with Steve Jobs in order to be the first to offer the not-even-named-iPhone-yet- 'new phone' from Apple, back in 2005. At the time, Son didn't even own a mobile carrier. He then purchased Vodafone, and was indeed the first to sell the iPhone in 2008 (then Au-Kddi in 2011, and DoCoMo in 2013). Today, 75% of smartphones sold in Japan are iPhones."

1 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. BULLSHIT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Android phones far outsell iPhones in Japan. See these charts as just one example

    http://kakaku.com/keitai/smartphone/

    IPhone sales only surpass Android sales for a few weeks after each new model comes out. Then it settles back down into the top 5 to 8 phones sold being Android phones.