I need a phone and I love the idea that iphone is getting anki which alone is practically enough for me to go buy the phone, but it has more, like looking up kanji and obviously phone functions and what not. Being able to take it back to America and use it too is a huge plus. Im going to live in Japan for a year and have a year visa, but it seems like they want you to sign up for a 2 year contract? Theres two other plans but I cant find anymore information about it as I have to go to a public place and usually the computers are in use so its hard to find out this information.

Is there a way I can sign up with iphone2 for a year contract or get prepaid minutes or something? I plan to unlock it. Also, will they let me buy the phone without a contract for a reasonable price (if necessary)? I heard rumours it was like $800 without a contract which is just ridiculous. I also checked like 5 places in akihabara that sold phones and theyre all sold out, is there a certain date I should check when Japan gets more?

Sorry for the wall of questions, I tried asking other people before coming here but had no luck.
Thanks in advance.

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=5106

raseru Wrote:I need a phone and I love the idea that iphone is getting anki which alone is practically enough for me to go buy the phone

I'm not sure where you got this info from, but this isn't the case. Damien has stated he MIGHT do a version (very strong emphasis on the might), but even if he does, it'll have to be for jailbroken iPhones, as the iPhone doesn't support the programming language that Anki was done in. To do a version for an iPhone straight off the shelf would mean he'd have to rewrite the entire program in C++. I'm no programmer but this is how I understand it anyway.

raseru Wrote:but it has more, like looking up kanji and obviously phone functions and what not.

The kanji input on the iPhone is apparently sluggish at best - there is some type of bug so the application is quite slow. Apple is working on releasing an update though, so this might not be a problem for long.....

raseru Wrote:Also, will they let me buy the phone without a contract for a reasonable price (if necessary)?

Per the link wrightak gave.

raseru Wrote:I also checked like 5 places in akihabara that sold phones and theyre all sold out, is there a certain date I should check when Japan gets more?

Softbank is giving out forms that you can fill in to go on a waiting list. Otherwise you could try your luck in smaller, out of the way shops. I've heard quite a few people managed to get them on release day this way, just walked in, it was pretty quiet, and they could pick one up straight away.

Hope that helps answer some of your questions!

Looks like Apple isn't putting much effort into the Japanese version of its phones. Doesn't even support the smilies that are standard on almost all Japanese mobiles.

Guess they're just trying to scrape a few extra bucks off the hype.

JimmySeal Wrote:Looks like Apple isn't putting much effort into the Japanese version of its phones. Doesn't even support the smilies that are standard on almost all Japanese mobiles.

Guess they're just trying to scrape a few extra bucks off the hype.

Apple just doesn't see Japanese emoticons, which aren't even really all that standard here across devices, as being important in the grand scheme of things.

I tend to agree.

thanks for the help everyone, seems like I'm out of luck unless I want to cough up 800 USD. Major rip off. Maybe I can get someone to mail it to me from America if they can buy it without a contract for pretty cheap

To the person who said damien MIGHT make the anki version, Im pretty sure now hes said a few times hes been working on the version as we speak on his forums.

FutureBlues Wrote:Apple just doesn't see Japanese emoticons, which aren't even really all that standard here across devices, as being important in the grand scheme of things.
I tend to agree.

Well, as someone who sends and receives about 50 emoticons a day (and I know maybe one Japanese person who uses less than I do), I think I'll hold off on the iPhone until Apple realizes that they are quite relevant in the grand scheme of things.

JimmySeal Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:Apple just doesn't see Japanese emoticons, which aren't even really all that standard here across devices, as being important in the grand scheme of things.
I tend to agree.

Well, as someone who sends and receives about 50 emoticons a day (and I know maybe one Japanese person who uses less than I do), I think I'll hold off on the iPhone until Apple realizes that they are quite relevant in the grand scheme of things.

I don't mean to rain on your parade or anything, but they aren't relevant as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Japanese phones can support emoticons because they have a greatly reduced feature-set that is specific to one network and only one network. They don't have to support a number of different EDGE and 3G frequencies that are used around the world and they don't have to offer support for every single language that Mobile OS X is responsible for. (There are no applications, etc. etc. This list is a long one.)

Apple has to ask themselves, "Should we support Japanese emoticons used in only 1 country out of our initial 21 launch countries at the potential detriment in speed and usability for every other non-Japanese customer in order to pander to a small section of the market that probably won't be interested in our phones anyway? (Analysts always point to girls aged 15-30 as the prime demographic that utilizes emoticons. Nobody under 20 could be trusted by their parents to keep a phone this expensive as their primary device and most Japanese girls I know in their 20s don't even know how to use computers. Remember, iTunes and a computer is a requirement for an iPhone purchase, according to Japanese sources.)

The answer to that question is no. I just can't see Apple moving to support something that exists only in Japan, is primarily used by a non-target demographic, and furthermore isn't even standard across devices or networks in the first place. I recommend weaning yourself of emoticons. With the iPhone you can send rich-media emails with REAL pictures and/or convince your emoticon-loving friends to actually start socializing in person. Kanji are also a great way to convey simple emoticon-esque emotional queues. Try some of these: 憂、憎、笑、懐、etc.

This is anecdotal and probably not indicative of anything, but none of the people I email out here in the countryside use Japanese emoticons. When I was with DoCoMo I was the one using the emoticons and now that I'm on my iPhone I've seen exactly one email with mojibake in it-- and that was from another American!

raseru Wrote:thanks for the help everyone, seems like I'm out of luck unless I want to cough up 800 USD. Major rip off. Maybe I can get someone to mail it to me from America if they can buy it without a contract for pretty cheap

To the person who said damien MIGHT make the anki version, Im pretty sure now hes said a few times hes been working on the version as we speak on his forums.

He's just jazzed up the basic keitai interface for the Anki server so it works really well with the iPhone now. I don't really see a need for a stand-alone app, to be honest. As long as you have some sort of internet handy, you're good. Granted, if you travel on an airplane or travel overseas, you may have problems, but that's what laptops are for.

I just love being able to sneak a few reviews in whenever I have free moments now. I'm able to add an extra 15 or so sentences a day without worrying about reviews.

FutureBlues Wrote:With the iPhone you can send rich-media emails with REAL pictures and/or convince your emoticon-loving friends to actually start socializing in person.

Emoticons are just a bit of fun that some people enjoy. It's hardly an indication that people don't socialise.

Also, I don't think your argument holds because Apple chose to enable hiragana input which is a feature unique to Japan. Emoticons on the other hand aren't unique to Japan at all, they're popular in lots of areas.

wrightak Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:With the iPhone you can send rich-media emails with REAL pictures and/or convince your emoticon-loving friends to actually start socializing in person.

Come on, emoticons are just a bit of fun that some people enjoy. It's hardly an indication that people don't socialise.

Also, I don't think your argument holds because Apple chose to enable hiragana input which is a feature unique to Japan. Emoticons on the other hand aren't unique to Japan at all, they're popular in lots of areas.

How (or Why, even?) would Apple launch the iPhone in Japan without supporting the Japanese language? Surely, the difference between the degree of support is clear here?

Japan's emoticons are unique to Japan. But again, even Japan's emoticons lack clear standards. Every cell phone displays translates them into graphics differently-- did you know that? Here's a good reason not to support emoticon rendering (taken from the Wikipedia article on emoticons): An August 2004 issue of the Risks Digest (comp.risks on USENET) pointed out a problem with such features which are not under the sender's control:

It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips.[9]

And finally, another barrier to emoticon support: "The Japanese language is usually encoded using double-byte character codes. As a result there is a bigger variety of characters that can be used in emoticons, many of which cannot be reproduced in ASCII. Most kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions analogous to ASCII art's level of complexity. To type such emoticons, the input editor that is used to type Japanese on a user's system is equipped with a dictionary of emoticons, after which the user simply types the Japanese word (or something close to it) that represents the desired emoticon to convert the input into such complicated emoticons. Such expressions are known as Shift JIS art."

Interestingly enough though, the iPhone does display most emoticons (barring carrier specific graphics) as plain text. So instead of seeing a graphical representation of an emoticon, you see: <0_o>. (I only just realized this. I've conditioned myself to ignore them, I guess.) So I guess the only real barrier is being able to apply emoticons to your own emails, given that the keyboard is missing some of the double-byte characters required for a lot of emoticons. I think what people really want though is a separate little menu with a bunch of predetermined graphics that they can pick and choose to append to every sentence and I just don't see Apple doing that.

FutureBlues Wrote:I don't mean to rain on your parade or anything, but they aren't relevant as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

They're not the least bit relevant as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But they are highly relevant in Japan, and if Apple wants to participate in the Japanese market, they should find a way to support this feature.

Quote:Apple has to ask themselves, "Should we support Japanese emoticons used in only 1 country out of our initial 21 launch countries at the potential detriment in speed and usability for every other non-Japanese customer in order to pander to a small section of the market that probably won't be interested in our phones anyway?

So why not just support them on models sold in Japan? Other hardware manufacturers don't have a problem making different firmware for different countries.

Quote:I recommend weaning yourself of emoticons. With the iPhone you can send rich-media emails

Lotta good that does me if I'm e-mailing someone on the DoCoMo network (and that's exactly where I'm sending most of the mail I send from my phone).

Quote:convince your emoticon-loving friends to actually start socializing in person.

What if they live 5 hours away?

Futureblues: I think you are misunderstanding a lot about Japanese cellphones.

While the graphics are rendered different on different phones (not providers), they always in my experience communicate the same message. A heart is always a heart, an envelope is always an envelope, etc. Also, they are not the same thing as MSN emoticons. They are not sent as strings of normal ascii characters such as (x) etc. They use characters reserved in JIS etc specifically for emoticons. My computer, when receiving such messages, generally renders they as empty boxes, except for a few which my default font actually has glyphs for. Finally, you are confusing kaomoji with emoticons, which are two different things. Emoticons are small pictures, kaomoji are drawings of faces with various character sets. While their purpose is the same, the implementations have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

The idea that implementing emoji would somehow make the iPhone unstable or slower is laughable, considering that all it requires is adding some glyphs to a font for a minimum level of compatibility.

What does the usage of emoji have to do with socialization or lack thereof? Japanese cellphones can already send pictures and movies (as well as videochat), but it isn't a popular feature because of the resulting bandwidth charges, phone storage filling up, longer download times, privacy issues, etc. Text email is the main way in which Japanese people communicate with each other, more than voice calls. If you receive many emails from Japanese people, you will realize just how much emoji most people use. For most people the lack of the feature will be a dealbreaker (if they realize before buying that there is no support).

Another important thing to point out is that many people use an emoji instead of a word in their email such as an envelope instead of メール or an airplane instead of 旅行. Not being able to display the emoji means that mails will become unintelligible.

I'm normally an Apple fan, but it seems that Apple has some come into Japan without understanding the market at all. The lack of standard-in-Japan features (emoji, oneseg, saifu keitai, etc etc) and the fact that iPhone will at best get only yearly updates (meaning it'll only fall further behind), combined with national brand loyalty and the fact that the phone is very much tied to a computer (which are nowhere near as popular as in the west) means that it will never be more than a niche device. Once the people that initially wanted an iPhone have one, I don't see the market expanding.

I think that the shaking up of the industry that Apple is doing is a good thing, but iPhone needs a lot of work to make it a real competitor in Japan imo.

Quote:

Quote:Apple has to ask themselves, "Should we support Japanese emoticons used in only 1 country out of our initial 21 launch countries at the potential detriment in speed and usability for every other non-Japanese customer in order to pander to a small section of the market that probably won't be interested in our phones anyway?

So why not just support them on models sold in Japan? Other hardware manufacturers don't have a problem making different firmware for different countries.

Here's the thing though... Apple has been successful in the Japanese market particularly because they don't alter their hardware and firmware to support quirky Japanese conventions.

Take a look at their fantastically successful iPods that dominate the MP3 space over here. They run the exact same hardware and software as their international counterparts, even though they're panned for all sorts of things that don't ultimately matter. Their laptop and desktop machines are exactly the same. Whereas MS throws up all sorts of software barriers to international use, Apple's OS X is exactly the same no matter what language it's in. Japanese programs run even when the language is set to English and vice versa.

The reason Apple can hold on to their niche and make fantastic profits here is because they can design their products in Cupertino, export them to Japan, and let people who want better hardware coupled with a nicer OS deal with the lack of support for Japanese niche conventions.

The iPhone is sold out everywhere! Europeans, Americans and Japanese-- everyone is scrambling to find iPhone 3Gs as they slowly trickle in and replace the current stock. Out here in the countryside we're sold out! Sold out! There were reservations before me at the Softbank kiosk here for the iPhone and I've been planning on getting this since the Japanese release was confirmed! Tell me again, why does Apple need to bother supporting this feature when its obvious they're selling gangbusters without it?

Every single Japanese person who I've shown my iPhone to was most put off by the price. I haven't heard a single complaint from anyone who's seen it about Phone Wallet, Television Support, Barcode Reading, etc. Not a single one. On the other hand, that's all you hear the analysts talking about: these features will kill it dead. Blah blah blah. The Japanese cell phone market is all kinds of wacky. Apple is bypassing that entirely with the power of their brand because getting bogged down into KDDI and NTT's walled garden means sacraficing everything that makes Apple products Apple products.

Last but not least, there is the Japanese App store. A year from now, you'll have emoticon email in the form of an application, assuming that the current application developers back up and realize that the iPhone isn't like other Japanese cell phones and begin building sophisticated applications in place of the cruft that's floating around on the App Store now.

FutureBlues Wrote:Interestingly enough though, the iPhone does display most emoticons (barring carrier specific graphics) as plain text. So instead of seeing a graphical representation of an emoticon, you see: <0_o>.

It makes perfect sense to render text emoticons as text, but I am referring to the specific graphics, which I assume are sent as reserved double-byte characters.

And if Gmail can receive, display, and send them, I don't see any reason why the iPhone couldn't:

Quote:Tell me again, why does Apple need to bother supporting this feature when its obvious they're selling gangbusters without it?

They don't need to, but they should. They're inconsiderate and arrogant if they don't.

JimmySeal Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:Interestingly enough though, the iPhone does display most emoticons (barring carrier specific graphics) as plain text. So instead of seeing a graphical representation of an emoticon, you see: <0_o>.

It makes perfect sense to render text emoticons as text, but I am referring to the specific graphics, which I assume are sent as reserved double-byte characters.

And if Gmail can receive, display, and send them, I don't see any reason why the iPhone couldn't:

http://www.jimmyseal.net/images/emoti.png

Quote:Tell me again, why does Apple need to bother supporting this feature when its obvious they're selling gangbusters without it?

They don't need to, but they should. They're inconsiderate and arrogant if they don't.

Steve Jobs, inconsiderate and arrogant? Surely we're thinking of two different men, here?

JimmySeal Wrote:They're inconsiderate and arrogant

And how is this news?

I think they need to fix the freaking unresponsive Japanese input and the lack of push mail before they bother with emoji. The phone is a lemon in its current form for a Japanese customer. It will only be a matter of time before it gets that reputation. I have already posted about this in the other iPhone thread. I love my iPhone but it is far from perfect. I am actually quite suprised just how far from perfect it is, since it is an Apple product. I expected more.

Here is a good Japanese Gizmodo post that points out many of the things that a Japanese customer may want. There are also a lot of great comments to read:
http://www.gizmodo.jp/2008/07/iphone_103.html
And here is the link I posted in the other thread:
http://digimaga.net/column/200807/iphone...s-bad.html

The only way I see the iPhone being a hit in Japan is as a secondary phone. I have already talked to 3 people who have said they would do it that way, if they do it at all, because, "it can't do 'Japanese' mail and is too heavy and wide".

I talked to two host looking guys with their new iPhones in McDonald's the other day. They wanted to buy music and knew that there was wireless there. They had no idea they had to sign up for a service to use the wireless. They also didn't know they needed a computer to use their iPhone fully. This was in spite of the 4 or 5 documents you have to sign that all state you need a computer. They seemed really angry when I explained it to them. The rumors will spread it will get a bad reputation. Lismo supports buying Japanese movies, dramas, and cartoons (something there is none of on iTunes Japan) as well as music over the normal AU signal, as far as I know. No silly wireless requirement.

I let one of my teachers use my iPhone to type a mail to her husband as a trial. It of course froze up and she never even bothered to finish the typing. She gave it back to me and said "As I thought, its not for Japanese".

I really wanted to see the iPhone blow apart the proprietary Japanese mobile market. Because it is an import, I fear it will only get one chance to make a good impression. I think the lack of all the little things, like emoji, that matter (for better or worse, used or unused) to Japanese mobile phone customers are eating away that chance. The push mail problem and the broken input are suicide for it.

Thanks for the links!

http://www.gizmodo.jp/2008/07/iphone_103.html Wrote:【iPhoneではできないこと一覧】
...
コピペ

Apple still hasn't added copy/paste support? Are they completely out of their minds?

dilandau23 Wrote:The only way I see the iPhone being a hit in Japan is as a secondary phone. I have already talked to 3 people who have said they would do it that way, if they do it at all, because, "it can't do 'Japanese' mail and is too heavy and wide".

This month's Nikkei Trendy came to exactly the same conclusion.

Quote:Because it is an import, I fear it will only get one chance to make a good impression. I think the lack of all the little things, like emoji, that matter (for better or worse, used or unused) to Japanese mobile phone customers are eating away that chance. The push mail problem and the broken input are suicide for it.

Completely agree. It's surprising how badly they've messed up.

After a few more days of reflecting on my iPhone I feel like it was a huge mistake to purchase it. It does have some nice features but there are just too many things wrong with it, especially for a second generation product. Not the least of which is a tendency to introduce garbled crunchy sounds into the middle of a phone conversation. I used to be against convergence devices. I felt that it was better to have an item that was designed with a single function in mind. Then I saw the Apple keynote where the first iPhone was announced. I changed my mind. Now that I have my iPhone I am having a serious やはり moment.

Its not as good as an iPod for music. For some lame reason, they took out the "group compilations" feature so I am forced to scroll through pages of artists with just one song to find the artist one I want. Also it seems to have a problem where it cant play random songs and, consequently, will be frozen till you skip to the next song.

Its not as good as a regular mobile phone because the battery life is terrible. I know its a "smart" phone but the point is it is a convergence device losing to a dedicated device. Signal strength does seem to be a bit worse too. Ringtone support is kinda cool, it would be better if it didn't cost you the price of the song twice to get a ringtone you like. The sounds for SMS are far more limited (no purchased ringtones allowed) and the email sound (that only comes after mail is actually fetched from the server in 15 minute to 1 hour intervals) is only an on/off setting.

It is just plain awful at email. I think the free phones at any of the JP carriers do it better. You can't even mail your own details to another phone without a ridiculous hack. The only attachments you can send are pictures or forwarded attachments from another sender. By extension there is no way to give someone's contact info to a friend. The lack of proper push mail from Softbank is asinine. Not to mention, some Japanese users apparently block email sent from computers and not mobiles. The iPhone counts as a computer (even if it does look like a mobile phone, more on this later). Today I discovered the feature that it can't send mail to addresses like naoto...34..mo.chita...benai.3..daiwarau..@whatever.ne.jp (more people have mail addresses like this than you would hope in Japan) without a warning that the mail address seems to have an error in it. Contacts do get filed in selectable あ、い、う、え、お categories in the Contacts App but when you go to add a contact to a mail from within the mail editor all Japanese names get filed under '#'. The only way to send to multiple people is select them one at a time (and remember that all Japanese names fall under '#'). Sending to a contact list is doable through some crazy hacks but nothing like you would expect or even want.

Sync with Outlook is a hack at best. There has been a bug since at least firmware 1.1.3 (according to one internet thread). If you edit a contact from Outlook on the iPhone, it becomes bugged and has to be reedited in Outlook to be repaired. It was really annoying to discover that the issue I was having has been around for some time.

The Safari browser is just hands down the best browser in a mobile I have ever seen. But there is no flash/java support so ads that say "browse the real web" are a bit misleading since flash is on just about every movie/music artist site and countless others these days. So "browse the real HTML only web" seems a bit more apt. Also, I don't know if I can fault Apple for this one or if I should fault isolationism, but "Japanese Mobile Only" sites are blocked from the iPhone. That includes Mixi Mobile. Granted you can use the regular Mixi interface (and decently at that) but the mobile one has a nicer layout for a small screen I think. So I guess you can't browse the "fake web" either.

The camera is a joke. It will become popular with the "Akihabara crowd" though, because the mandatory "shutter noise" is easily missed. Not to mention the speaker sound can be 99% muffled with light pressure from a fingertip effectively making it a silent shutter. EDIT: Just discovered that you can control shutter noise with the volume too! No speaker covering necessary.

I don't have to stop here but you get the point. You have been warned. If they ever fix any of these things I will come back here and post it but for now I really needed this rant. I wake up every day and pray that I will turn on the news to hear of a recall or magic fix all update, but I know that is a fools dream...only 746 more contract days to go.

iphones are too fancy for me. I like simple. Simple and functional beats out features and complexity - which is my general life view.

I also bought the new iPhone. I'm pleased with my purchase so far, but I didn't have an iPod previously. Since the theme of this topic seems to be iPhone gripes though, let me lay out some of my own:

-The GPS is very slow and not very accurate, this may be because the system is unable to get triangulation assistance using cell phone towers or wi-fi in my area. In fact I doubt the wi-fi assitance will be helpful anywhere in Japan, it isn't very popular here.
-16GB is going to get used up quickly.
-There aren't any good/polished iPhone study apps yet. (I wonder if it would be possible to get a web interface app for RevTK/Trinity)
- 3G speeds are underwhelming, but I do live in a relatively inaka area.
-90% of the stuff on the App Store is useless crap, but maybe that's par for the course for software in general.
- The kanji writing input interface only supports Chinese, not Japanese. Setting Chinese traditional should be able to identify most Japanese characters though if and when a good dictionary comes out. In fact, I was hoping apple would port their excellent waei and eiwa jiten from Leopard. In lieu of that I'll settle for an EPWING reader. I hear there is one available as an unofficial app for jail broken phones.
- The camera is horrendous. They shouldn't have even bothered. Because of this I still have to carry my exilim S10 around. fortunately it is very tiny as well. I don't think it's possible for the camera to be any better until they can really shrink down the current components and use the whole top quadrant of the iphone back for a retractable lens. Even then it would be very awkward.


Overall, I think the device has a ton of potential for Japanese study and otherwise once decent (hopefully free, this thing's already so expensive!) software comes out; I'm confident it will. (If not, I might start work writing some on my own). If you expect to use your iphone primarily as a Japanese study device, hold off on your purchase. Otherwise, go ahead and buy, it's a great device, you won't be disappointed.

komodo Wrote:If you expect to use your iphone primarily as a Japanese study device, hold off on your purchase. Otherwise, go ahead and buy, it's a great device, you won't be disappointed.

You should also say, if your going to use the iPhone primarily as a mobile phone in Japan and to email your friends in Japan, hold off on your purchase. I don't see how anyone living in Japan for any length of time could be satisfied with the crap email.

dilandau23 Wrote:some Japanese users apparently block email sent from computers and not mobiles. .

Why?