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New Lower Japanese Pricing in App Store (Yay!)
I just went to the App Store today and was amazed to see the new prices… I had contacted Apple Japan by email, feedback form and finally by phone in an effort to ascertain why prices were so fracking expensive.
For example, until the new pricing came into effect, Japanese customers (me included) were paying nearly 50% over the odds… Due to the really high yen.
The Yen, as it stands is currently at an unfathomably high ¥78 per US$1.
For example.
- $0.99 was ¥115 = $1.47 at current exchange rates.
- $4.99 was ¥580 = $7.34
- $9.99 was ¥1150 = $14.70
- $49 software was ¥5800 = $73.41
Now, thankfully things are far more reasonable.
- US$0.99 software is now ¥85 = $1.07
- US$4.99 software is now ¥450 = $5.69
- US$9.99 software is now ¥850 = $10.75
- $49 sofware is now ¥4500 = $56.90
Who is the iPhone Girl (or iPhonegirl as she’s known as online)?
The iPhone Girl or iPhonegirl as she’s sometimes known has generated over 20 million searches on Google’s Chinese servers alone.
Who is she and why is she so famous?
Somehow, her picture was found on an iPhone bought by a customer from Kingston upon Hull in the UK going by the Mac Rumours handle of markm49uk. He apparently debated for a few days whether or not it was ethical to post her (rather cute) face online, but in the end put up for everyone to see.
It turns out that she is one of the 270000 employees of FOXCONN the Chinese factory that assembles the majority of Apple, Dell and HP computers.
Eventually, they found out who she was and she has been given some time off to avoid the press which have been hounding her since her name was released.
The good news is:
“She is definitely not fired,” an unidentified representative from Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen, southern China, told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao who called the event, “a beautiful mistake”.
Thank goodness for that.
If I knew I was going to get some more pictures of her, I’d probably buy myself an iPhone, she’s very cute… although, probably only about 15!
Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to wait until DoCoMo starts selling them.
The iPhone faces an uphill rollout in Japan
Well, the iPhone 3G has been out almost one month now and I’d like to post a little belated article on its progress in Japan.
The iPhone has invariably met with rave reviews wherever it has been rolled out and has now cornered 1.1% of the world’s handset market. That’s the world’s handset market, not the smartphone market.
In terms of smartphone market, reports put the iPhone anywhere between 20% and 30% of the total market share. This is a significant achievement for a company that has very low presence in the corporate sector.
But how about in Japan?
A report in June stated that 91% of phone purchasers would not consider an iPhone 3G if released in Japan. This result was put down to various reasons.
The top reason was fixed battery, followed by the carrier, Softbank, which has a rather speckled reputation and is known for its labyrinthine escape clauses on its contracts.
However, since the iPhone was released and the public have had access to the “real thing,” perceptions have changed somewhat, with reviews becoming markedly more popular.
Ironically, though, it’s functions that westerners might feel are unnecessary that are causing the most friction to wide adoption.
No one handed typing
The sideways mode presents a full Qwerty keyboard for typing with great Japanese conversion software, but most phone users in Japan will avoid that like the plague. They’d rather use the iPhone’s 9 key keyboard which has a patented and very advanced Japanese input method which, given just a little practice can be used to type about twice as quickly compared to using any other phone.
The iPhone is larger than your average phone and is actually easier to type on due to the larger surface area available for the keypad. This in and of itself would be considered a great advancement in western terms.b
However, in Japan it’s whether or not you can type one handed -while holding on for dear life onto a support strap on a crowded commuter train- that dictates whether or not a phone will succeed.
The first iteration of the iPhone software was terrible for Japanese, forcing them to use a nasty little Querty Keyboard.
Version 2.0 is much improved and offers Chinese and Japanese handwriting support and a great Kana input method.
But it’s still a little large for Japanese hands!
Remember, we are talking about a market where many a beautiful clamshell phone design has died a death because it can’t be opened with the press of a button or the flick of a thumb.
Given that Japanese women, who like to use their phones for messaging more than men, tend to have smaller hands than their western counterparts and given that mobiles in general are popular in Japan because practically everyone commutes long distance by train (averaging 30 minutes or more one way on the crowded transport systems of major cities) this is a double whammy against the iPhone’s adoption.
Force a large number of phone users to have to type on their phones with two hands and you’ll cause a nasty crush whenever the train stops and four hundred passengers lurch forward because they weren’t holding on.
I know this happens, because I accidentally got on a newly introduced women’s carriage on a train and all the women were texting away on their phones or reading. Traditionally, rather than raise their own arms and expose their armpits to total strangers, they rely on the more fully dressed men to hold onto the overhead straps and support them when the train stops and starts, but there were no men holding on to the ceiling straps and most of the women weren’t used to this.
When the train stopped, two hundred women in the carriage I was in fell forward, got trapped between the front wall of the carriage and other passengers, fell onto seated passengers or quite dangerously ended up in a mass of arms and legs. Only myself, holding on to the overhead straps and the woman standing next to me, who grabbed me when the train stopped managed to stay upright.
Put a couple of hundred iPhones in the hands of Japanese passengers and repeats of this scene, plus photos of crushed iPhone carnage will be splattered on news sites and newspapers across Japan.
No “emoji”
Emoji are a standardised set of emoticons for all Japanese phones. They cover a wide range of emotions, feelings, convenient objects, actions and places, the weather and transport systems. Without emoji, a Japanese person will have to type a message ten times longer in order to say the same thing and not be misunderstood.
Needless to say, the iPhone cannot send emoji. Worse, when receiving emoji from others, the character is replaced with an “=” sign or displayed simply as a code such as #6834, rendering the mail illegible.
If the typing problems don’t put you off, this will make the email function practically worthless.
No infrared transmitter
Japanese phones come with a phone to phone infrared transmitter to “beam” your vcard (address, phone number, photo, profile or other private details) to another phone. These are standard and work across any carrier, any make, brand or generation of Japanese phone.
Not having an infrared transmitter means you’ll never get the phone number or email address of a potential pick-up at a bar: Congratulations, you’ve effectively ostracised yourself from the dating circuit.
No strap loop hole
This may seem ridiculous, but there is no place for a strap on the iPhone. In Japan, every phone has a place for a strap, and some people have straps that weigh more than the phone itself! Remember that the more fashion conscious tend to have more straps, so it’s ironic that the iPhone, a tech-fashion icon doesn’t have one.
No strap? No deal!
Potential Mac OS X future roadmap and evolution
You may or may not remember a time when Mac OS X was for Macintoshes (later renamed Macs) only. This is no longer the case, since recently several non Mac devices now sport versions of OS X.
Note the distinction between Mac OS X and “just” OS X without the Mac prefix.
The current state of affairs shows OS X running on three main architectures.
- Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel in the new range of Mac Pro, iMac, Mac Mini and MacBook computers along with a 10.4 based variant running on the Apple TV
- Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC (PPC) in the old range of PowerMac, iMac and PowerBook computers.
- Mac OS X 10.4 based (?) ARM variant in the iPod and iPhone series of handheld devices.
- First, they will most probably be dropping PPC G5 and earlier from Mac OS X as of 10.6.
- Yes it would, that’s why, with their recent purchase of P.A. Semi they are going to continue OS X development for their PWRficient range of Power chips!
So how does this help them?
- Apple have alluded to the fact that PA Semi will create system on a chip solutions for future devices. Thus, most probably iPod, iPhone and any future handheld devices will use the Power architecture. Apple TV type devices might even move to this platform, rather than staying with Intel.
The big question here is what happens to the ARM Branch?
- Their investment in that branch is nowhere near that of their Intel and PPC incestments, so they may justify writing it off.
- Desktop / Laptop and potential future mini PCs. (perhaps Apple TV like appliances).
- iPhone, iPod, future handheld devices, future Apple TV and other appliances.
The only fuzzy area in the above picture is where do the “middle” devices (i.e. neither handheld nor portable) fit? Will they fall on the Intel side or the PWRficient SOC side?
Either way, this is a much more streamlined future and should help focus the Mac brand and the OS X brands while helping future development and maintainability.
The Nanchatte Technojunkie 
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