How Steve Jobs Got the iPhone Into Japan

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."

Comments

BULLSHIT!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:BULLSHIT!

[invictusvoyd]

Irrespective of what sells and what does not , both the iphone and the android have let down the geeks. Iphone is a decent platform but the proprietary bulls**t of apple is anything by geekiness.. The android on the other hand is pure evil . based on big data money models , google cares a squat about the users. The application layer is inherently insecure and the whole open sauce thing is pseudo.
IMHO Both are crap phones .

Re: BULLSHIT!

[Migity]

It's still bullshit because anybody can go on there and rate whatever they want. It's not a real chart of sold items but a popularity contest.

Re:How Steve Jobs got iPhone to Japan. Real story.

[AmiMoJo]

Sorry, that's rubbish. The Japanese value features in the electronics above all else. Their entire economy is built in consumers replacing perfectly good appliances with new ones just to get some new feature the old one didn't have. Even mundane stuff like rice cookers keep adding new things and you can pay over 100,000 yen for a top of the line model.

When the iPhone first came out it did have a bit of an edge on features in some areas. The problem is that it was rapidly overtaken. There are a lot of Japan-only phones that it was competing with but which people in the west know nothing about. These days the lack of things like NFC is a big issue. Even stuff like the camera, traditionally an Apple strong point, is looking weak in the face of competition with optical stabilization.

It is absolutely about substance and tangible features in Japan. Style is important too, but the Japanese actually research stuff before buying and specs matter. Just visit any bookshop and see the shear number of books on which smartphone to buy, and how they evaluate them.